Democrats

In FERN’s latest story, in partnership with The New York Times, reporter Ted Genoways explains how Tim Walz, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, is taking the fight to Republicans in rural America.

Approaching her 60th birthday, Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, a member of the House Agriculture Committee, announced she will retire in 2022 after 10 years in the House. "It will be a new decade and I feel it's time for a new voice," said Bustos. Her decision also reflected the shrinking influence of the farm and industrial heartland in the House.

Farm subsidies would be reformed "to better support small- and mid-sized farms" if Joe Biden is elected president, says the draft platform written ahead of next month's Democratic National Convention. "Democrats will increase funding for food assistance programs, including SNAP, WIC, and school meals."

Ninety percent of House Democrats are on record in support of an impeachment inquiry, making House Agriculture chairman Collin Peterson an outlier in arguing against it. Sometimes called the most conservative Democrat in the House, Peterson is nearly alone among members of his committee in questioning the investigation.

Congress "is falling short when it comes to food policy, showing little progress" this year, says Food Policy Action, established in 2012 as the food movement's voice in Washington. In releasing its annual scorecard of members of the House and Senate, the group said the average score was 49 percent, down from the 57 percent average of the two-year 114th Congress, which ended in 2016.

Casting herself as a centrist, North Dakota Democrat Heidi Heitkamp announced she is running for a second term in the Senate, potentially an uphill race in a state won by landslide margins by President Trump last November. Heitkamp told the Fargo Forum that she believes there is an …

Third-term Rep Rodney Davis, a Republican member of the House Agriculture Committee and an early critic of the 2010 school lunch reforms, has a Democratic challenger for 2018, says Roll Call. A lawyer and former House staff worker, Erik Jones, has entered the race against Davis in the Republican-leaning district in downstate Illinois.

House Democrats are targeting often-conservative rural districts in their drive to gain control of the House in the 2018 midterms, and the DCCC has named Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois to lead the effort.

Vickie Rock, a member of the Democratic state central committee in Nevada, describes Donald Trump's victory in the presidential election this way: "The Democratic Party ceded rural America to the Republicans quite some time ago," reports Roll Call. It says rural Democrats "are now hatching plans to un-do the damage, convinced that a handful of simple steps would go a long way toward winning votes."

Two Republican-held House seats in the heavily agricultural Central Valley of California could be ripe for picking by Democrats if voters are riled by GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump's criticism of Hispanics and immigrants, says the Los Angeles Times. Rep. David Valadao, a member of the Appropriations subcommittee that oversees USDA and FDA funding, represents a district that is 71 percent Latino, and Agriculture Committee member Jeff Denham has a district that is 26 percent Latino.

Democrats tapped six newcomers for the House Agriculture Committee, including Gwen Graham of Florida, who defeated the Republican advocate of large cuts in food stamps.

The Senate is expected "in the coming days to restore more than 50 tax breaks, all of which expired at the end of 2013, just through the end of this year," including the Section 179 business expensing provision, says The Hill newspaper.