The Hill:
House Republicans on Wednesday charged that a multibillion-dollar settlement with black farmers supported by the Obama administration was rife with fraud.
At a press conference in the Capitol Visitor Center, Reps. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and Steve King (R-Iowa) alleged that a $1.25 billion Agriculture Department settlement to resolve discrimination claims included individuals who were never farmers.
That’s a rather astounding accusation coming from “Farmer Bachmann,” who lives in a posh $1.27 million manor on the 18th hole of a golf country club, yet still manages to harvest thousands of dollars each year in federal farm subsidies from the Bachmann Family Farm in Independence, WI. In fact, the Bachmann Family Farm has raked in more than a quarter-million dollars in federal farm subsidies on their Green Acres in Wisconsin since 1995.
Karl Bremer wrote a while back about one of those phony farmers feeding at public farm subsidy trough...
When I wrote in November about Rep. Michele Bachmann collecting federal farm subsidies through her family’s limited partnership, some claimed that her “no” vote on the 2007 farm bill, which would extend farm subsidies through 2012, cleared her of any charges of hypocrisy. After all, a vote against the farm bill was a vote against the very subsidies she was collecting, they argued.
But a closer examination of Bachmann’s votes on amendments to the 2007 farm bill shows that Bachmann wasn’t voting against the subsidy programs that she was reaping at all. In fact, she explicitly voted for them—even for wealthy farmers.
The issue of farm subsidies going to wealthy urban “farmers” who have never had dirt under their fingernails has become a political hot potato recently. So when the 2007 farm bill came up, the Bush Administration pushed for a $200,000 income cap for federal farm subsidy recipients.
In the House, Rep. Ron Kind (D-WI) offered an amendment that would end subsidy payments to farms where the average adjusted gross income of the farm’s owners exceeds $250,000. Bachmann voted against Kind’s amendment. The amendment failed by a large margin, 309-117.
The Bachmann Farm Family Limited Partnership, a 949-acre Buffalo County, WI, farming operation in which Bachmann owns up to a quarter-million-dollars interest, collected $47,128 in federal farm subsidies between 2004-2005, according to the Environmental Working Group. That same operation has collected as much as $127,868 in federal farm subsidies since the partnership was established in 2001.
It’s not known whether Kind’s amendment would have cut off subsidy payments to the Bachmann Farm Family Limited Partnership. One can only speculate whether that provided any motivation for Bachmann’s vote against the amendment, since calls and e-mails to Bachmann’s office on this subject were not returned.
If anyone would know about collecting thousands of dollars in federal farm payouts without ever getting dirt on her high heels, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann would.
Here is Bachmann and her creepy pal Steve King acting like prosecutors reading an indictment:
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