Lactose Tolerant: How Jeffords keeps getting milk.(Senator James M. Jeffords leaving the Republican Party, a theory linking the decision to the Vermont milk industry)(Brief Article)

There have been many explanations for the defection of Sen. James Jeffords from the GOP: He is a man of principle. He is a lefty. He cares about education. He is just a weasel. But as the debates raged, an odd consensus emerged on one point: The Northeast Dairy Compact is a Third Rail of American politics, and even Sir Thomas More would swear the Oath of Supremacy if the sanctity of this obscure price-fixing milk cartel were in jeopardy.

On May 9, The Hill ran a story saying that the White House might side with Wisconsin Democratic senator Herb Kohl in his bid to kill the Compact. Fifteen days later, Jeffords left the GOP. On PBS's NewsHour, Norman Ornstein suggested that Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal deserved some of the blame for Jeffords's departure, since Gigot had written on April 13 that the White House should kill the program to punish Jeffords for his liberalism. The milk-compact theory quickly became Beltway conventional wisdom, and nuclear metaphors started to proliferate. Even before Jeffords made his jump, Ornstein wrote in Roll Call that going after the Compact would be an inappropriate "grand punishment," and push Jeffords into using "the nuclear weapon" he had in his "arsenal."

The normally defiant White House responded, denying not only that they had ever threatened the Dairy Compact, but even that they had ever thought about it. What are you, crazy? White House press secretary Ari Fleischer insisted at a press briefing that the Bush administration would never tamper with Vermont's milk-Marxism. "I'm not aware of anybody who said that about dairy programs. The two stories I saw on that were absolutely unattributed. There was never any statement by anybody at the White House. And I think that the press has to be careful before you draw causal connections to events where you do not see anybody named either on background or on the record. So be careful there, please."

In recent years, we've associated such White House denials with accusations that the president played baron-and-the-milkmaid with an intern. Now it's an accusation that the president wants to kill a 20- cents-per-gallon subsidy to actual milkmaids. Congratulations, America: This is the sort of scandal-free politics you've been asking for. And isn't there something terribly depressing about all of this? Say it with me, brothers and sisters: The Northeast Dairy Compact is a program designed to make milk more expensive for poor children.

A federally mandated cartel established in 1996, the Compact sets artificially high prices for milk produced and consumed in the New England region, amounting to a regressive sales tax on poor families with lots of kids-and benefiting what liberals would call Vermont's greedy Big Milk industry if George Bush had been a governor from Vermont instead of Texas.

Of course, the dairy industry has been nearly Sovietized since the Great Depression. America, that shining example of free enterprise, is divided into a hodgepodge of bovine fiefdoms in which creameries and other businesses must buy from local cows. Bureaucrats set one price for beverage milk and another for milk used in cheese and other products. Meanwhile, the overall price is largely determined by a complicated formula that takes into account how many miles a specific dairy company is from Eau Claire, Wis.-the hub of the dairy industry in 1937. Like they say, it's funny because it's true.

But while milk prices in the rest of the country are at least somewhat susceptible to the pressures of supply and demand, the Northeast Compact is more like a dairy version of Hillary's health-care plan. Defenders claim it is the lactic equivalent of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and the National Trust for Historic Preservation combined. The Compact's website declares: "The Compact serves several major functions including: assuring the region of an adequate supply of milk, recognizing the cultural and economic benefits of a viable dairy industry to the region, ...