Democrats need PC to protect SNAP.

Food stamp legislation all but certainly had enough support to pass on a floor vote if the Ag Committee would have allowed it; President Johnson was even able to get a pilot “surplus commodities” program instituted administratively in 1962. Finally, to save the farm bill, the Southerners struck an agreement to build on the surplus commodities demonstration and include food stamps in the package. This arrangement was permanently enshrined in the 1977 farm bill.

“That historical contingency forever changed the politics of the farm and thus the direction of our country’s ag policy,” said Jonathan Coppess, the author of The Fault Lines of Farm Policy and the former administrator of the Farm Service Agency at the Department of Agriculture under President Barack Obama.

Republicans dominate rural America today, and Democrats the urban core. This polarization set up a recurrent political dynamic, which began after Republicans took the House in 1994. Republicans wage war on the poor by threatening cuts to SNAP in order to gain political leverage, even though rural areas are increasingly signing up for SNAP as poverty rises. This allows the GOP to extract as many pounds of flesh as they can for their Big Ag benefactors. In recent years, that’s meant loopholes for a cap on payments that a single farm can receive and also allowing the extended family of farmers to acquire subsidies even if they don’t actually work on the farm.

For their part, Democrats expend their political capital to protect SNAP, and cede most decision-making about agricultural programs to Republicans. To the extent that Democrats push for changes to the agriculture titles, they often broker compromises to expand programs that suit the parochial interests of the states they represent. For example, Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow, the current Democratic chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, championed the Local Agriculture Market Program (LAMP) in the 2018 farm bill, which delivers grants to help farmers markets.

“It’s a lot like a hostage negotiation between both parties to jam their priorities through,” said policy adviser Ferd Hoefner.

By the end of the bipartisan back-scratching, hardly any lawmakers understand the full scope of the bill they’re voting for. Usually checking in at nearly 1,000 pages, the legislative boondoggle is so long and convoluted that you’d have better odds finding lawmakers who’d read the entirety of a Thomas Pynchon novel than the full text.

Most of the programs Republicans fight for in the farm bill would not be able to pass in their current form on a straight floor vote. SNAP, on the other hand, carries much higher popularity among voters in polling. The welfare side of the bill is what makes the package politically possible. But the ag subsidies are what keeps rural America in a perpetual state of crisis.