By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
United States Sen. Pat Roberts had planned to tour Kansas one last time before retiring from politics after 40 years.
That simply wasn’t possible in 2020.
Roberts, a Republican who is leaving the United States Senate after four terms, had planned to visit all 105 Kansas counties this year.
“So, I was really looking forward to going to every county and just saying thank you and sitting down over a cup of coffee and visiting with folks. Well, along came COVID,” Roberts tells St. Joseph Post. “So, we’ve been Zooming like everybody else and that is the best substitute under the circumstances, but there’s nothing like personal contact. So maybe we’ll do that down the road.”
Roberts won election to the Senate after serving 16 years representing the Big 1st District of Kansas in the U.S. House. He first won election to the Senate in 1996.
Roberts laments a loss of collegiality in Washington over the years, a collegiality he has seen leading the Senate Ag Committee.
“And you’ve got to get to know people,” according to Roberts. “People who are on the Ag Committee, we sit around a small table. We don’t have a big committee room. We know each other and we know that the job of getting a farm bill transcends any partisan politics that we may have. So, we’ve been very fortunate.”
In his farewell speech from the Senate floor earlier, Roberts stated, “I lament the loss of comity, the ability to work together, or just get along.”
Roberts has a distinction in Washington: the only member of Congress to serve as chair of both the House and Senate Agriculture Committees.
“Well, you’re working for the finest people that our nation has to offer as far as I’m concerned: farmers, ranchers, growers, for that matter everybody in the food-value chain,” Roberts says. “We are still feeding our country the best quality food at the lowest prices in the history of the world. Also, we’re feeding a troubled and hungry world.”
His high point? Passage of the Freedom to Farm Act.
“So no longer the government could dictate what a farmer would plant,” says Roberts. “The farmer would make that decision, according to the market.”
Roberts calls Freedom to Farm an historic move which wouldn’t have happened without a lot of teamwork as well as the Republican surge in 1994, which carried the party into the majority in the United States House after decades in the wilderness and brought Congressman Newt Gingrich of Georgia into prominence, eventually elevating him to Speaker of the House.
Roberts favors increased trade and chafes at President Donald Trump’s characterizations of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he helped write and the Trans Pacific Partnership, which Roberts supported.
Still, Roberts can’t argue with Trump’s tough stance with China.
“China’s not behaving themselves, at all. We’ve just seen a lot of headlines now about China and they’re influence and hacking into all sorts of our infrastructure,” Roberts says, adding that Hong Kong as we knew it is gone with Taiwan looming as a big issue for President-elect Joe Biden and his security team.
American farm policy is at a crossroads and Roberts isn’t thrilled with the formation of the Biden Administration.
“If you look at his cabinet picks, especially EPA and others, we’re going to go right back into a lot of regulation that I think was terribly counterproductive,” according to Roberts.
Roberts says he understands Trump wanted to blunt China’s ambitions of becoming the dominant nation.
“But, if you trade with them and if we’re able to sell them the best quality food we have in the world and they are dependent on our food supply, that at least gets you a seat at the table and that is a chip to play.”
We will have more with Sen. Roberts on Monday.