The congressman from the 3rd District is Frank Lucas, a Republican who won the seat in a 1994 special election. Soft-spoken and unflashy, he is the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee. Read More

The congressman from the 3rd District is Frank Lucas, a Republican who won the seat in a 1994 special election. Soft-spoken and unflashy, he is the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee.

Lucas’ family roots in western Oklahoma extend more than 100 years; he owns a farm and cattle ranch in Roger Mills County and was elected to the Oklahoma House in 1988, at age 28. He got his chance to run for Congress when Glenn English, a 19-year conservative Democrat, resigned. Lucas had serious competition in both the primary and the general election. In the initial voting in the primary, he trailed state Sen. Brooks Douglass, who campaigned from his Oklahoma City base, 36%-34%. In the runoff, Lucas ridiculed “some Johnny-come-lately dressed up like a drugstore cowboy” and carried all of the rural areas to win 56%-44%. In the general election, he faced Dan Webber, the 27-year-old press secretary to former U.S. Sen. David Boren. Lucas ran an ad depicting the U.S. Capitol and saying, “This is where Dan Webber has worked his entire adult life.” The ad displayed a picture of Oklahoma farmland and said, “This is where Frank Lucas has worked his entire adult life.” Lucas won 54%-46%. Since then, he has been re-elected by wide margins.

Lucas’ voting record is mostly conservative, but less so on cultural issues. His main focus is the pragmatic work of the Agriculture Committee, where he became the ranking Republican in the 111th Congress (2009-10). After rising to chairman in 2011, he told The Wall Street Journal in March that “everything is on the table” for cutting spending and that he regarded farm subsidies ardently championed by rural lawmakers from both parties as part of the discussion. But he said reducing subsidy programs should be done through the farm bill, which is due for completion in 2012. He also promised to work on implementing pending free trade agreements and conducting aggressive oversight of the Environmental Protection Agency. “It seems that every day the EPA is proposing a new regulation, facilitating new litigation or allowing unelected bureaucrats to run wild across the farms and ranches of America,” he told the American Farm Bureau Federation’s newspaper. He has been sharply critical of President Barack Obama, accusing him in April 2010 of seeking to turn rural areas into “bedroom communities” by proposing to cut the maximum direct payment to farmers, which go to those who have received subsidies in the past even if they are not actively growing crops.

On the committee during the drafting of the 2002 bill, Lucas helped to unravel the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act and its attack on government subsidies, although he had once embraced the law and its conservative philosophical underpinnings. Lucas helped write provisions to control erosion, aid farmers hit by drought, and protect air and water quality. He successfully fought a plan to reduce the number of Farm Service Agency field offices. In the minority party during the work on the 2008 farm bill, Lucas strongly opposed an overhaul of farm programs as “a threat to the nutrition of the whole, entire world,” and he mostly succeeded in preserving subsidies for his district, which ranked 14th in subsidies between 1995 and 2009.

Also with an eye on his district, Lucas helped to write the final provisions in the 2005 energy bill governing rural grants and biodiesel tax credits. He remains a proponent of government support for alternative fuels, particularly switch grass. On the Financial Services Committee, Lucas has been a reliable supporter of the banking and insurance industries. The liberal Center for American Progress complained in December 2010 when Lucas hired a former U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbyist as the senior staffer to oversee the Community Futures Trading Commission, which was charged with implementing the new law cracking down on the financial industry, including provisions on over-the-counter derivatives. The Office of Congressional Ethics in 2010 targeted Lucas as one of eight lawmakers who conducted fundraisers around the time of a vote on the bill, but dropped its inquiry.

Back home, his main challenge is the physical size of the district. From his home in Cheyenne, it extends 80 miles south, 240 miles west to the Panhandle, and 270 miles east to Tulsa’s outskirts—more than 34,000 square miles. But the real trouble for the easygoing Lucas seems to be on his ranch, which he operates. He broke his nose years ago when a cow slammed a gate on him, and he lost a tooth while trying to attach an identification tag to a 250-pound heifer.