The most interesting meeting today was with Aleta Botts, one of six staff directors with the House Committee on Agriculture. She works in the House of Representatives offices in the Longworth Building beside the Capitol Building. She and the rest of the committee are in the middle of drafting the new farm bill. The House has an 858-page draft and the Senate has a 1,800-page draft. President Bush says he would veto both versions as they are currently written. So between now and the end of February the House and Senate ag committees have to get together and create one bill that will pass both chambers and win approval of the president. I get the sense that no matter how the final bill looks, the level of support will not change much, if at all. The U.S. is not likely to reduce its farm support programs unless it has to under a WTO agreement. And even then, it might not. Right now the House and Senate have different numbers for target prices, market loan rates and direct payments — the three tiers of commodity price support. There is also some pressure to level the real (or perceived) supports for southern crops — particularly rice and cotton — with the supports for wheat, corn and soybeans in the Great Plains. House committee leader Collin Peterson has to work with his Senate counterparts to go through the bill line by line to find middle ground, all the while taking advice from interest groups, who are widely varied and relentless, and from the president, who has veto power. We thought making policy in Canada was tough. Writing a U.S. farm bill is a two and a half year process.
Not everything we see and hear in D.C. comes out of a stuffy meeting room. I heard two neat things about Ulysses S. Grant the past couple of days. Grant was president from 1869-1877, and it was in the famous Willard Hotel in Washington that he invented the term “lobbyist.” He must have had an office in the hotel and everyone who wanted to bend his ear over some issue would wait in the hotel lobby for their moment. Grant one day referred to these people as “lobbyists,” and the term stuck.
There is a big statue of Grant on a horse out front of the Capitol Building. Seeing him today inspired one of our guides Virgil Bodeen to tell another story about Grant’s dying days. He was poor and had throat cancer and was worried he would die and leave his family with nothing. So Mark Twain encouraged Grant to write his memoirs as a way to make some money. So Grant did, and Twain edited them. Most of the stories are about Grant’s many war experiences and not his presidency, Bodeen says, but he says the book is a great read. And it did make some money to carry his family through.
I had time before supper today to go the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. All Smithsonian museums are free and this one is the most visited museum in the U.S. — for good reason. You walk in and right above you are Charles Lindburgh’s Spirit of St. Louis and Chuck Yeager’s Bell X-1, the first plane to break the sound barrier. It just gets better. There is a whole room full of WWI planes and another with WWII planes. You’ll see lots about jets and space travel. Here is some trivia that I learned at the museum. You can test these questions on your family.
1. How many Americans have walked on the moon? A: 12
2. Where were the Wright Brothers from? A: Dayton, Ohio
3. What type of business did the Wright Brothers operate? A: They made and sold bicycles.
4. When was the first Boeing 747 commissioned? A: 1969
5. How many planes did the Red Baron shoot down? A: 80
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