Democrats Pack War Funding Bill With Extras to Get Votes for “Slow-Bleed”;$4 Billion More For Farmers Among Proposed Bribes

House Democrats offered a variety of bribes to their colleagues this week in an attempt to dispel opposition to their slow-bleed strategy of attaching troop limitations to the latest war supplemental. The most outrageous of these was a $4-billion package of farm subsidies, the bulk of which would go to farmers in the Midwestern districts of a handful of Blue Dog Democrats like House Agriculture Committee Chair Collin Peterson (D., Minn.).

“They haven’t released the specifics of their draft yet,” a GOP House staffer tells National Review Online. “But ‘drought relief’ is expected to be a big part of it, and Collin Peterson is Exhibit A of a Dem being bought off.”

Yesterday, Peterson told The Hill’s Alexander Bolton, “I don’t think the supplemental will pass if we don’t [include the $4 billion],” adding that, by failing to pony up the cash, “They’d lose [my vote]”

With nothing less than victory in Iraq at stake, Peterson has announced that for $4 billion in “disaster relief” for Midwestern farmers, his vote is for sale. What makes that $4 billion so important that it suddenly renders Peterson indifferent to the outcome of a foreign war?

A trip to the Environmental Working Group’s farm-subsidy database is instructive. Since 1995, the farmers of Peterson’s northwestern Minnesota district have collected $374 million in disaster-relief payments from the federal government. In 2003 alone, they collected $91 million — a number that was eclipsed two years later when Peterson successfully steered them $99 million more. The top recipient that year, the Oberg Farms Partnership, collected $400,000 in disaster-relief payments alone. The total haul for Oberg Farms in 2005, which included its annual basket of regular crop subsidies, was $677,500 — over half a million dollars before they sold a single ear of corn.

Peterson unfortunately realizes that he will not always be able to use the Iraq War as a bargaining chip in his effort to keep the farmers of his district dependent on the federal government’s largess. That is why he and a handful of other farm-state senators have sponsored “[a] bill [that] would create a program that would automatically dole out dollars for significant farm losses in federally declared disaster counties.” Even the farmers are against this idea, because they are afraid it would cost too much money and cut into regular crop subsidies.

Collin Peterson is not the only member of Congress who is trying to smuggle pork aboard the current war supplemental. But like Trent Lott and his railroad last year, he is destined to become this year’s poster boy for reformers seeking to fix the badly broken war appropriations process. Because Iraq and Afghanistan are funded through their own supplemental rather than out of the Pentagon’s budget, Congress must pass a new bill each year or else strand our troops without money and equipment. This presents a perfect situation for opportunists like Peterson to attach pet projects. In fact, farm-staters tried this exact same thing last year, but the $4 billion was scaled back to $500 million after Bush set a cap on the bill that, if exceeded, would trigger a veto.

It may take a similar show of fortitude to fend off this year’s slew of extra projects, but now that the Democrats have added troop limitations to the chemistry of the bill, it will be even more difficult for Bush to take a stand. The only long-term fix is to fund the war through the regular budget process, even if it means running the risk that the Pentagon will fight to keep the money in its budget after the war is over. “We’d rather have that money go to Defense” than watch the pork pile up every year, one GOP Senate staffer tells NRO.

Minnesota Mega-Mall Asks State Legislature For a New Parking Structure;

“If You Build It, They Will Come,” Mall Says The owners of the Mall of America, a 96-acre shopping complex located on the outskirts of Minneapolis, are coming to the taxpayers of Minnesota with a simple message: We’re grateful for the $108 million in subsidies we’ve taken since we opened in 1992. Now we just need $234 million more.

Lobbyists for the megamall argue that the subsidy package is really more of a loan. They say that a planned expansion, which they’ve given the Ed Woodian name “Phase II,” promises to draw millions of additional shoppers to the mall each year, thus increasing sales-tax revenues. Naturally, the mall needs taxpayers to build them a new $181 million parking structure so the state can reap this windfall.

King Banaian, chairman of the St. Cloud State University economics department, is skeptical. “Let’s think about this: Mall of America is huge. So, we’re going to make it huger, and somehow more people are going to come to Mall of America?” Banaian tells NRO. “The marginal gain in [sales tax] revenues is likely to be pretty small.”

Banaian says the mall’s request is easy to understand when you look at the context: “There’s a small surplus in the budget right now,” he says. “Everyone wants to ask about their favorite project.”

Ed Morrissey, the Minnesota-based blogger who writes Captain’s Quarters, put it this way on his blog last week: “If we have enough money in the budget for subsidizing stadiums and parking garages for private enterprises, then we have collected too much money in taxes.”