GOP Dukes It Out Over Dairy

(AP)  For a few Republican lawmakers, perhaps the biggest battle facing House-Senate negotiators on a huge budget bill isn't a high-profile issue like cutting food stamps and Medicaid or opening a stretch of pristine Alaskan coast to oil drilling.

It's milk.

Specifically, it's the Milk Income Loss Contract program that pays dairy farmers when prices drop.

For some, like Rep. Mark Green of Wisconsin and Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, their political lives could be at stake. Green and Santorum represent states dotted by family dairy farms. Their battle is with Republican colleagues from Western states with much larger dairy operations.

Compared with hot-button issues, the internal GOP battle over the Milk Income Loss Contract program seems pretty obscure. The program expired Sept. 30. Extending it for two more years would cost taxpayers $1 billion.

Green and Santorum are among the few Republicans facing challenging statewide campaigns in states won by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004. Both are pulling out all the stops as they try to revive the milk program.

Green is running to unseat Wisconsin's Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle; Santorum is lagging in the polls in his bid for re-election. Then there's Rep. Mark Kennedy, R-Minn., running for the Senate. Two weeks ago, he cast the decisive vote in the House to pass a $50 billion deficit reduction bill after receiving assurances that the milk program would get new life.

Their opponents in the milk battle aren't Democrats. The tricky politics of dairy policy pits region against region rather than one party against another. Republicans from states like California, Arizona, New Mexico and Idaho — whose farmers don't really benefit from the program — are leading the opposition, creating the GOP family feud.

Farmers from states where dairy herds tend to be smaller — such as Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania — benefit more from the milk program since it pays farmers only on the amount of milk produced by about 120 cows in a year. Western states with their generally larger herds benefit far less.

"Dairy policy isn't partisan," says Green. "As a Republican in the majority, I'd love it to be partisan. It's not. It's geographic, so getting the support for it is much harder."

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