It’s easy to see why Eligio “Kika” de la Garza was elected to 16 consecutive terms in the House of Representatives (1965 to 1997) and served his final seven (1981 through 1994) as chairman of the wide-sweeping and often unruly House Ag Committee.
“I’m a reasonable person,” the south Texan, born just two miles from Mexico, liked to say, “I can get along with anyone.”
And he mostly did, I once heard him explain to a crowd of farm leaders in a packed Washington, D.C. meeting, because his guiding legislative principle was “from the Good Book itself, Isaiah 1:18: ‘Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord.’”
It was a fitting code for the easy-going but tough-as-nails de la Garza. In the last 90 years, there have been 18 Farm Bills written and passed by Congress. Kika had a role in seven and chaired the process on three: the 1981, 1985 and 1990 bills.
He was a legislative plow horse — he got things done — and, for a Democrat, was decidedly middle of the road, even conservative. For example, while he fought for food stamps, voting rights and sugar price supports, he also favored balanced budgets, free trade and prayer in classrooms.
Most of these positions would not win any Democrat a House leadership post today.
And yet he went unchallenged as Ag Committee chairman for 14 years and three tough Farm Bill negotiations because he was “reasonable.” Politics, he said at that same farmer meeting, “is the art of the possible. The nation succeeds when politics succeed.”
And most everyone — farmers, the nation, Congress — did succeed under his leadership. The New York Times headline for his March 15, 2017 obituary would have met with his approval: “Kika de la Garza, Texas Congressman and Farmers’ Ally, Dies at 89.”
Few on today’s House Ag Committee stand out as “let’s-sit-down-and-reason” leaders like Kika. Part of it is the blood-spilling tenor of today’s winner-take-all politics; the goal is to win without compromise.
Another key part of it is that most committee members don’t know beans from buttermilk when it comes to farm and food policy. Farm visits are for a selfie on a combine or to tout Big Ag fantasies like manure digesters and carbon pipelines.
That means most are easily swayed by special interests pushing special projects and by AgBiz’s never-ending lament of too much regulation and too little income support.
The result often is legislation written by the permanent, unelected government — the farm and commodity groups and agbiz lobbyists — and not the elected government.
In the past five years, recently noted Karen Perry Stillerman, the deputy director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, “Agribusiness interests have spent a huge sum of money — $523 million — lobbying Congress…”
And the money has bought what it wanted and what most American eaters and taxpayers don’t want: a heavily-subsidized, commodity-driven farm policy focused on fading export markets, a slowly drying up ethanol market, and gazillion-dollar carbon schemes that won’t save the environment in a million years.
Now Big Ag’s big dogs are whimpering again, worried that today’s Farm Bill — already extended one-year and facing another extension — will hang fire through November’s general election. The delay risks the Republicans losing control of the House and with it, the big dogs their influence on any 2025 Farm Bill.
If so, their failure is emblematic of a Congress that bloviates more than legislates; where committees hold hearings and no one listens; where it can’t pass a bill, let alone an annual budget, on time and within its means.
In short, Congress is broken and only good will and reasonable people will fix it.
