Having recently left the country for a few weeks of media deprivation therapy, I returned to find excited pundits comparing President Obama to Richard M. Nixon on the basis of three transparently bogus White House “scandals” that make Starr’s fabled “Whitewater” investigation look like the crime of the century.

Once again, the word “impeachment” is in the air, as excited GOP congressmen dream of driving a Democratic president from office. Once again, the nation appears to be headed for a fun-filled summer of televised hearings, elaborately feigned indignation, and predictions of dramatic revelations that either never materialize or blow up in their sponsor’s faces.

With luck we might even see something as funny as the day in 1995 when a partisan S&L regulator who’d planned to market Hillary Clinton-themed “Presidential BITCH” t-shirts from her government office fainted dead away under cross-examination. The witness had to be carried from a Senate hearing room, never to be heard from again.

Deeply committed to Whitewater humbug, the New York Times, Washington Post and TV networks contrived not to notice.

The good news is that couldn’t happen again. Today, the ill-fated L. Jean Lewis’s swoon would be all over YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Sure, she’d get her own Fox News talk show, but rationally consequent citizens wouldn’t have to watch. The Internet has lessened the ability of scandal entrepreneurs in the Washington media to control the flow of information to the rabble.

Sure, the Internet empowers crackpots. But it also enables in-house bloggers like Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein to bring facts and arguments into the online pages of the high-dollar press that could be censored out of the “mainstream” as recently as the Clinton administration.

So nobody’s getting impeached on this tripartite nonsense, OK?

Anyway, let’s take them one at a time:

One: Regarding IRS “targeting” of right-wingers, I’m planning to rename my little one-man cattle operation “Tea Party Patriot Farm.” With that on my Schedule C, the IRS won’t dare to audit my tax returns. I’ll be free to deduct not only feed bills and veterinary expenses, but pizzas, movie tickets, six-packs, whatever. My recent train ride across France? Studying French cattle husbandry techniques at 180 mph.

But see that’s the thing. Contrary to a thousand indignant screeds and editorial cartoons, no aggrieved Tea Partiers got audited, fined, or jailed. Instead, they saw their applications to turn their political hobbies into tax-free scams — oops, charities — delayed for a few months, on the quite reasonable assumption (from an IRS functionary’s point of view) that an organization named for a political party might actually be one. Boo hoo hoo.

The IRS was politically idiotic, no doubt. But until somebody tracks this to the White House, it’s a big nothingburger.

According to the survey, 51 percent approve of the way that Obama is handling his job as president, while 44 percent disapprove. These numbers are nearly unchanged from the researchers’ previous poll in April, which found Obama’s approval at 50 percent, with 45 percent disapproving.

That the president’s approval has held steady is somewhat surprising, in light of the public’s receptive attitude towards the GOP’s claims that the White House is trying to mislead the public with regards to two “scandals.” Respondents agree that the Obama administration is trying to cover up the truth about the IRS’ scrutiny of Tea Party groups by a 45 to 42 percent margin, and they say that the administration is covering up the facts about the Benghazi attack by a 55 to 33 percent margin.

Although voters believe the Republican story about the Benghazi attack and its aftermath, the GOP is seeing next to no benefit — 45 percent say that congressional Republicans’ Benghazi inquiry is “just political posturing,” compared to 44 percent who say it’s raising legitimate concerns. Furthermore, voters seem to consider the investigations to be a distraction. Just 33 percent say that congressional Republicans are mainly concentrating on things that are important to them personally, while 60 percent say they are not.

President Obama fares far better on this question; 51 percent say he is concentrating on things that are important to them, and 44 percent say he is not.

The steadily improving economy is likely stabilizing the president’s approval ratings. The poll finds that 56 percent say the economy is on the mend, which is the highest number to say so in a Washington Post-ABC News poll since 2009. Furthermore, voters are now split at 48 percent on whether they approve or disapprove of the way Obama is handling the economy, representing a net 9 percent improvement from one month ago.

When asked who they trust to do a better job handling the economy, 46 percent say Obama, while just 37 percent say congressional Republicans.

The Washington Post-ABC News poll is the latest in a string of surveys to find President Obama’s approval unharmed, despite the popular narrative that the White House is on the defensive. The results strongly suggest that the GOP would be better served by confronting the White House with a compelling economic argument instead of an impeachment hearing — but, given the party’s recent history, it seems unlikely to learn that lesson until it’s too late.

AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File

While Republicans are busy comparing everything President Obama does to Watergate, they’re not only showing their complete lack of historical knowledge, they’re also ignoring the remarkable decline of their party.

In poll after poll, the percentage of adults who identify with the Republican Party continues to decline. (See the red line in the chart above.) Today 3.5 percent fewer Americans identify with the GOP than in November of 2008, when the incredibly unpopular George W. Bush was still in office and President Obama had just been elected in a massive landslide.

I posted a version of this chart a few days ago and that red line has dived even further since then.

A new CNN poll also finds that the Republican Party now has the highest unfavorable rating in the 20-year history of that poll.

There are a number of explanations for why the GOP is getting less popular every day. The most positive spin is that the party is experiencing growing pains as Republicans in Congress are making progress on one of the party’s top “outreach” priorities — immigration reform.

But what’s more likely is that the party that elected Mitt Romney to run against Mitt Romney’s health care plan is further purifying its ranks, driving away anyone who isn’t absolutely committed to denying climate change and/or opposed to compromising with President Obama. Instead of broadening their audience, they’re speaking only to themselves.

While the media is finally buying into the GOP’s scandal narrative, Republicans sound as angry as they did about the IRS controversy as they did about health care or the stimulus. After five years of attacking Obama, they still haven’t put together any positive message that can grow their party.

Here are five signs that they’ve learned nothing from 2012.

Most residents probably won’t notice.

A scant turnout is expected Tuesday when voters choose between two City Hall regulars who failed to bring much sparkle to the contest to succeed Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who exits office July 1 after two up-and-down terms.

Only 1 of 4 voters in the nation’s second most populous city is projected to cast a ballot, possibly a historical low. And the tightness of the race suggests a winner might not emerge on Election Day, and it might take days to count all the ballots.

Democrats Eric Garcetti, 42, a city councilman who could become the city’s first elected Jewish mayor, and city Controller Wendy Greuel, 51, who could become the first woman to hold the job, occupy so much of the same policy turf they’ve been dubbed “Greucetti.” A steady stream of negative advertising from the campaigns and outside groups has helped obscure the candidates’ promises about free-flowing traffic, new jobs and better schools in coming years.

Voters also will judge three competing proposals to manage the city’s proliferation of pot shops, forcing residents to weigh the needs of the sick against complaints about crime around the dispensaries.

While some cities successfully managed pot collectives, Los Angeles fumbled and dispensaries sprouted across the city. Proposition D would cap the number of collectives that opened prior to 2007, about 135, and raise taxes slightly; Proposition E would cap the number at the same level but raise no new taxes; Proposition F wouldn’t limit the number of pot shops but would put stringent controls such as audits and background checks on employees — and also raise taxes.

The proposition with the most votes wins, but only if it collects a majority. If none of the measures receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the issue could bounce back to the City Council.

Greuel and Garcetti emerged from a March primary in which no candidate secured the majority needed to win outright, leading to Tuesday’s runoff. Only about 2 in 10 voters went to the polls in that race.

The mayoral contest that has seen record spending, over $30 million overall, and the outcome will swing on appeal with key voting groups, including blacks, Latinos and women, and turnout in the San Fernando Valley, South Los Angeles and other battleground neighborhoods.

On Monday, Greuel sent off a final round of recorded endorsements from former President Bill Clinton, in whose administration she once worked, while Garcetti was on campaign stops arguing a simple point: the election matters.

While Garcetti could become the first Jewish man elected mayor, he would not be the first Jew to hold the job. Bernard Cohn was mayor briefly in 1878, after being appointed to fill a vacancy.

The lack of public interest runs counter to what’s at stake. A key issue has been the city’s shaky $7.7 billion budget and the prospect of living with less. Spending is projected to outpace revenue for years, and rising pension and retiree health care bills threaten money that could otherwise go to libraries, tree-trimming and street repairs. Villaraigosa is urging his successor to try to block a 5.5 percent pay increase for civilian employees.

With so much common ground on policy, the race became a duel over character issues as well as a referendum on who is closer to politically powerful municipal unions often criticized for landing generous raises and benefits.

Garcetti’s commercials labeled Greuel “DWP’s mayor,” a reference to the Department of Water and Power, whose workers are financing ads to help install her at City Hall. Greuel’s attack ads have hit Garcetti for a fundraiser organized by a developer who she says once served prison time for fraud.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) rose to the floor of the Senate last week to give his weekly speech begging his colleagues to reject climate-change denial, and ended up giving an eerie warning to Republicans who refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence that suggests we’re reaching a tipping point when it comes to carbon pollution.

Making the “political” argument, Whitehouse asked Republicans to consider the prospects of embracing the five percent of scientists who believe mankind isn’t fueling climate change.

“An iron curtain of denial has fallen around the Republican Party,” he said. “So let me respectfully ask my Republican colleagues: What are you thinking? How do you imagine this ends? ”

Presciently, just days before a mile-wide tornado devastated Oklahoma, the senator asked Republicans to consider the extreme weather events being fueled by climate change:

Have you noticed the floods and wildfires and droughts and superstorms and tornadoes and blizzards and temperature records? Have you noticed those warming, rising seas? Have you noticed species invading new territory, and miles of dead pine forests in the Rockies, and Arctic sea ice disappearing?

Do you understand that carbon in the atmosphere gets absorbed by the sea, and that that is a law of science and is not debatable? Do you understand that because they are absorbing the carbon the oceans are getting more acidic? Thirty percent more acidic already and climbing? Do you understand that’s a measurement, not a theory?

It’s one thing to be the party that stands against science. Are you really also going to be the party that stands against measurement?

ProPublica’s job is to report the news rather than to make news ourselves, but sometimes we find an article of ours to be itself a subject of public debate. Last week was such a time, when two articles we had published back in December and January became the subject of significant attention in light of the uproar over IRS oversight of the process for granting tax exemption to so-called “social welfare” groups under section 501(c)(4). We triggered that attention with a third article we published on May 13, setting out everything we knew about the circumstances of our previous stories.

Largely ignored in a public outcry last week — radio rants, Twitter storms, congressional, presidential and prosecutorial posturing– were the following:

Our pieces in December and January raised very serious questions about whether six different “dark money” political groups seeking tax exemption had made false statements on their applications. Those applications are signed under penalty of perjury. If any false statements were made knowingly, the groups – including Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS — may have committed a crime. There is no indication, however, that either the IRS or the Department of Justice has done anything since January to investigate whether such crimes were indeed committed. The groups in question happen all to be conservative. Not one congressional Republican has, to my knowledge, expressed any concern about this possible criminality.

Even more remarkably, leading public figures have asserted as fact that they know how we came to receive nine documents in the mail — statements that appear to have little basis (and in some cases, no basis at all).

The former acting Commissioner of Internal Revenue said on May 17 that the agency’s inspector general had found that the disclosure to us was “inadvertent” — we had requested the applications, but they should not have been sent to us before they were approved. The IRS followed later the same day with a statement to the same effect — but then refused to answer questions about who had made the mistake, and why they should be believed when they denied having acted intentionally (and thus likely denied committing a crime).

What really seems to have happened at the IRS in Cincinnati, across the last three presidencies (a Democrat, then a Republican, then a Democrat), and across two turns of the partisan screw in the House of Representatives, from Republicans to Democrats to Republicans again, is that the agency has been starved of resources, and badly mismanaged.

But while it took the IRS four long days to tell people about their conclusion of “inadvertence” and the same four days for ProPublica to report out the dysfunction , people like Rush Limbaugh, and their followers and fellow travelers on Twitter and in the fringe press, rushed headlong to judgment. Here’s what Limbaugh said about the mid-level federal employees at the IRS in Cincinnati on Tuesday: “The people at these government agencies have been stocked with leftists for decades now, and they’re all activists.” What evidence did he offer for this? None. How could he know that someone in a large bureaucracy, shuffling thousands of pieces of paper, didn’t make a mistake? He couldn’t, and he didn’t.

The extraordinary call was an admission that the FBI’s actions violated Justice Department policy about seeking journalists’ phone records. But nothing about what the FBI did in 2004 appeared to run afoul of any law.

The Justice Department’s latest effort to examine whom journalists are talking to — the secret subpoena of Associated Press phone records from April and May of last year — demonstrates how government investigators are guided more by policy and the judgments of high-ranking officials than by specific laws or, in this case, the need to satisfy an independent federal judge.

The AP case involves a criminal investigation into who gave information to the news cooperative’s reporters about a foiled bomb plot in Yemen. The AP’s May 7, 2012, story attributed details of the operation to unnamed government officials.

The government informed the AP 10 days ago that it had secretly obtained records for 21 phone numbers, including those of the reporters on the bomb plot story. The department’s guidelines, first drafted in the wake of Watergate-era government abuses, call for news organizations to be informed before investigators ask phone companies for records unless doing so would compromise the investigation.

Attorney General Eric Holder said the story was the result of “a very serious leak, a very grave leak.” AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt called the gathering of phone records a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

New developments emerged Monday in another case that has led to the indictment of an official for revealing classified information. Federal prosecutors got a search warrant for the private emails of Fox News reporter James Rosen and used building security records at the State Department to track his movements as they sought to identify whom he had relied on for classified information in a story about North Korea.

The tension over balancing the government’s duty to protect national security and the media’s role as public watchdog is long-standing. Take away protections for reporters’ confidential sources and “the people who know what’s happening become fearful, and they will not come forward with information the public may find very valuable,” said Lucy Dalglish, dean of the University of Maryland’s journalism school. “It’s a classic chilling effect.”

But neither, said George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr, does the public want a world of free disclosure by government workers with no opportunity for the government to investigate. “It requires a very delicate balance. We wouldn’t want either extreme,” Kerr said.

One possibility for compromise is a long-discussed federal media shield law to go along with similar laws in most states. Even as President Barack Obama defended his administration’s aggressive pursuit of leakers of government secrets, he also said Congress should consider a law that generally would protect journalists from government subpoenas and allow judges, in rare instances, to decide whether national security concerns trump press freedoms.

Sens. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said they would introduce a new version of a media shield bill that Congress last considered four years ago.

The congressional proposals — and there have been many over the years — are partly a response to a 1972 Supreme Court ruling that nothing in the First Amendment protects reporters from being called to testify before grand juries. Justice Byron White’s majority opinion scoffed at the idea that it would dry up confidential sources. He said Congress was free to give journalists, or “newsmen” in that era’s parlance, additional protection under federal law. That case arose in the context of the government’s pursuit of Black Panthers and also drug users in Kentucky.

But the 5-4 ruling in Branzburg v. Hayes also has bedeviled generations of prosecutors, media lawyers and judges because one of the five justices in the majority, Lewis Powell, wrote a concurring opinion that suggested that maybe the court’s holding was not as absolute as it sounded. Powell said courts would consider the competing claims of prosecutors and journalists case by case, and called judges to strike “a proper balance between freedom of the press and the obligation of all citizens to give relevant testimony with respect to criminal conduct.”

At the time, Justice Potter Stewart charitably referred to Powell’s opinion as “enigmatic” and hoped that it would lead to “a more flexible view in the future.”

Last year, Judge Albert Diaz, a member of a federal appeals court panel that is weighing an effort to compel a reporter’s testimony in an investigation of unauthorized disclosure, called the 1972 ruling “clear as mud.” The panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., has yet to rule on the attempt by New York Times journalist James Risen to avoid testifying at the trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling. Sterling is accused of leaking classified information about a botched covert operation in Iran.

Earlier, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, the trial judge handling Sterling’s case, sided with Risen, saying, “A criminal trial subpoena is not a free pass for the government to rifle through a reporter’s notebook.”

Other courts, though, recently have rejected journalists’ attempts to quash subpoenas for their testimony.

The rules governing how the government seeks other information such as emails haven’t kept up with the pace of technology. When it comes to electronic records held by Internet service providers, technology companies and credit card companies, the rules “are not as strict as they are for news media telephone toll records,” said Alan Butler, appellate advocacy counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

The wide sweep of the subpoena — across AP bureaus in Washington, New York and Hartford, Conn. — and the lack of advance warning make the government’s approach look “more like a dragnet” than the narrowly drafted request the Justice Department guidelines say is required, Dalglish said.

University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone said Justice Department officials are aware that the broader they cast the net, the more questions they will face. “They reached as far as they did because it was the only way to get the information they needed,” Stone said.

As for the lack of notice, he said, it was at least plausible to believe that the authorities “really want to catch this guy who leaked really bad information, from their perspective. They didn’t want to do anything to scare him off.”

Little-known outside his home state, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley has methodically checked the necessary boxes toward earning the reputation of good Democratic soldier as he considers whether to run for president in 2016 — a White House bid that would face long odds.

It’s very early. Obama still has more than three years left in his presidency. And no one is officially in the race.

Yet, O’Malley already is overshadowed by the buzz surrounding the mere prospect of a Hillary Rodham Clinton candidacy. If not her, talk in Democratic circles turns to Vice President Joe Biden.

Despite the hurdles, the 50-year-old former Baltimore mayor is publicly undaunted.

On a trip to Israel last month to seemingly boost his foreign policy credentials, O’Malley disclosed publicly what had been arguably the worst-kept secret in Annapolis — that he would use the last half of this year to consider seeking the presidency. His Washington-area appearances at fundraisers Tuesday for Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and June 12 for Iowa Senate candidate Bruce Braley are certain to raise eyebrows even further given that the two candidates represent states that traditionally weigh in first in a Democratic primary.

While O’Malley is one of the few Democrats openly talking about succeeding Obama, aides say he hasn’t made any decisions about his political future. That includes whether he would run or not if Clinton, whom he endorsed and campaigned for during her 2008 race, decides to seek the nomination. Democratic insiders say the former secretary of state would be the heavy favorite should she launch a campaign.

A former head of the Democratic Governors Association, O’Malley is one of the party’s top fundraisers and made clear his national aspirations when he worked to raise more than $1 million for Obama’s re-election campaign, the most of any sitting Democratic office-holder.

Then, last fall, he headlined Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin’s annual steak fry — a must-stop for any presidential aspirant seeking to compete in the state’s traditional leadoff caucuses. He followed that up with a springtime speech to party activists in South Carolina, another stop in the early primary contests.

Aides say O’Malley, now the DGA’s finance chairman, will spend more time in places with active governors’ races in 2014 — states like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida — giving him a way to court the party’s elite without the media glare of early primary states. He also is scheduled to address the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank with close ties to the Obama administration, on May 30.

Through it all, O’Malley will be overseeing implementation of his latest liberal legislative victories, new laws that would put him in lockstep with many party activists who play pivotal roles in primaries and caucuses.

He has successfully pushed through a measure to make Maryland’s gun laws among the toughest in the country. A key provision would make Maryland the first state in nearly 20 years to require people who buy handguns to provide fingerprints to the state police. O’Malley also scored long-sought victories that have eluded him in earlier years, including repeal of capital punishment and a bill to help develop offshore wind power in Maryland.

In November and on O’Malley’s watch, voters approved the state’s same-sex marriage law and a state version of the Dream Act, which allows immigrants living in the country illegally to pay in-state tuition at public colleges and universities.

The governor, whose second term ends in January 2015, boasts of a data-driven approach aimed at managing his state through budget cuts and tough economic conditions.

“Who we are and what we’re about is pretty clear and it makes it easier for people to accept some of those choices and some of those decisions,” O’Malley said in an interview during the legislative session that ended April 9. “We don’t expect many of them ever to be popular — whether it’s cuts or taxes. None of them are popular in isolation but as a whole it’s part of the better choices we need to make for better results. I think the people in our state understand that we’re better off than most.”

Throughout his tenure, Republicans have tried to tag him as someone who places his national ambitions ahead of the state and point to tax increases — he has raised taxes on the wealthy and boosted the state’s gasoline tax to pay for transportation projects — as a sign of what could come.

“Republicans would be thrilled to death to run against O’Malley if he became the nominee,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based Republican strategist.

And that’s a big if, judging by early polls that show him barely even registering.

Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller, a Democrat, sees a bright side for O’Malley, saying he has positioned himself to run well in the presidential primaries by promoting an agenda that sits well with the party’s base.

“The good news is that he’s a great Democrat, and he’s a very progressive person and has put forth a very progressive agenda, and if that is what you believe in, then you’ll think he’ll make a great president,” Miller said. “So his principal detractors are those who have a much more conservative philosophy and so he has all the makings to win a Democratic primary.”

___

Thomas reported from Washington.

___

Follow Ken Thomas on Twitter:

Follow Brian Witte on Twitter:

The high-tech issue involves a negotiation at arm’s length between industry, which relies on ever-increasing numbers of skilled foreigners, and organized labor, which represents American workers, according to lawmakers and officials close to the talks.

As drafted, the bill would raise the current cap on so-called H-1B visas from 65,000 annually to 110,000, with the possibility of a further rise to 180,000. At issue in the talks are the costs that companies must bear to bring foreigners into the United States, the steps they must first take to seek out American citizens for the jobs and other conditions.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, whose state has a large high-tech industry, told reporters on Monday he will vote in favor of the legislation in committee if agreement is reached on the issue. He has been negotiating with Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who said in late afternoon no deal had been sealed.

On the other major remaining unresolved issue, officials said there was a growing if unspoken expectation that the measure would likely emerge from committee without a provision granting same-sex spouses the same access to legal status as heterosexual spouses are entitled to.

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Committee, has introduced a proposal to give equal treatment under the bill to same-sex couples, a provision gay rights groups seek. Several lobbyists and others noted during the day he has not yet said definitively said if he will seek a vote on it before the panel completes its work, and neither the White House nor other Democrats on the committee have made a strong push for its inclusion.

A vote on the proposal could create political difficulty for Democrats on the committee who support gay rights and are also members of the so-called Gang of Eight which negotiated the main features of the legislation. That includes Sen. Chuck Schumer or New York and Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois.

Durbin has told outside groups he will back the change if it is offered. Schumer hasn’t said which way he would vote.

All eight have pledged to maintain the essential outlines of the legislation. A vote to add the gay rights provision could lead to approval on a party-line vote in committee, but lead to the collapse of Republican support on the Senate floor and the bill’s demise.

In addition, the Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling by early July that could render the issue largely moot.

At its core, the legislation would provide an opportunity of U.S. citizenship to millions of immigrants living in the country illegally, create a new visa program for low-skilled workers and permit a sizeable increase in the number of high-tech visas, at the same time it mandates new measures to crack down on future unlawful immigration.

Final committee approval is expected by midweek, with the full Senate likely to begin debate next month.

The measure is one of President Barack Obama’s top domestic priorities, although the administration has generally let the committee work on its own.

In a show of support, though, Obama and Vice President Joe Biden arranged to meet Tuesday in the Oval Office at the White House with individuals directly affected by the measure.

In a long day of drafting on Monday, the panel voted to begin phasing in a requirement for foreigners to undergo fingerprinting when they leave the country. Lawmakers also agreed to make an immigrant’s third drunk driving conviction a deportable offense in some cases.

The committee rejected other proposals that backers of the bill said were unworkable.

Among them was one by Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., to require that every application filed as a first step toward seeking citizenship be done so online.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, sought to include a provision requiring applicants to disclose any Social Security numbers they had used previously, but that fell on a party-line vote.

Democrats, too, were forced to scale back some of their proposals to win support.

Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, dropped a provision making Pell Grants available to individuals who have embarked on the path to citizenship. She won agreement for more limited benefits, such as access to financial aid.

The Obama administration said Monday it wants to see more cuts to crop insurance and farm subsidies in the legislation, which would cost almost $100 billion a year over five years and would set policy for farm programs and food aid.

The bill would cut about $2.4 billion annually from overall farm spending. But it would still expand federally subsidized crop insurance and raise some subsidies for rice and peanut farmers. The White House did not specify how large a cut it was seeking.

Almost $80 billion of the annual cost of the bill is for domestic food aid, with most of the rest of the money split between farm subsidies, federal help for crop insurance and programs to protect environmentally sensitive land.

The government spent an estimated $15.8 billion on the program for the 2012 crop year after a drought destroyed many crops, up from $9.4 billion in 2011. The government subsidizes about 62 percent of farmers’ insurance premiums and also subsidizes the insurance companies that sell the policies. The cost of the program has risen in recent years because of bad weather events and record-high crop prices.

The Senate began debating the bill Monday, with Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., saying she expected several amendments to be offered on the crop insurance program. Stabenow and other farm-state senators have argued that crop insurance should be maintained and even expanded because it protects farmers when they need it most and because farmers contribute some of their own money to the program.

Critics say federal contributions to crop insurance are too generous and subsidize big agricultural businesses.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., offered the first crop insurance amendment Monday, proposing an end to $33 million a year in insurance policies for tobacco farmers. A buyout for tobacco farmers enacted nine years ago is phasing out government payments to tobacco farmers, but many of them still receive crop insurance.

“It turns out Joe Camel’s nose has been under the tent this whole time in terms of crop insurance subsidies,” McCain said, referring to a character that used to appear on packs of Camel cigarettes.

Cuts to the food stamp program are also expected to be a contentious issue on the Senate floor.

The administration statement did not say whether President Barack Obama supports $400 million in annual cuts to the food stamp program contained in the Senate bill. The statement said it supports the food stamp program, now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, but did not specifically mention the cuts.

The Obama administration has been stronger in opposing cuts to SNAP in the House farm bill, which are about five times as much as the cuts in the Senate bill.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Monday he was “deeply concerned” about the House food stamp cuts, which he said would “deny struggling families and their children access to food assistance.”

Though Senate Democrats have generally opposed cutting food stamps, Stabenow included the small cuts in the Senate version of the bill to try to appease House Republicans who say the program is too expensive.

The legislation approved by the House Agriculture Committee last week would cut about $2.5 billion a year, or a little more than 3 percent, from SNAP, which is used by 1 in 7 Americans.

The House legislation would achieve the cuts partly by eliminating what is called categorical eligibility, or giving people automatic food stamp benefits when they sign up for certain other programs. It also would save dollars by targeting states that give people who don’t have heating bills very small amounts of heating assistance so they can automatically qualify for higher food stamp benefits.

The Senate bill, also approved in committee last week, saves money in the food stamp program only by targeting the heating assistance dollars.

While calling for deeper cuts to subsidies, the White House also called for Congress to maintain the strong safety net farmers have now. Current farm programs expire Sept. 30.

“It is critical that the Congress pass legislation that provides certainty for rural America and includes needed reforms and savings,” the White House said.

The Senate passed a similar bill last year, but the House did not consider it.