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Rep. Thomas Massie has sharply criticized the Trump administration’s reported plan to allow 300,000 metric tons of foreign ground beef into the U.S. tariff-free, calling the move harmful to American cattlemen and consumers. Massie argues that increased imports could temporarily lower beef prices while discouraging U.S. ranchers from rebuilding herds and expanding domestic production. He is also renewing his push for the PRIME Act, legislation aimed at expanding local meat processing by easing federal inspection requirements for qualifying intrastate sales. The debate highlights growing tensions over beef imports, cattle markets, meatpacking consolidation, and the future of American ranching.


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00:00How did that help American farmers? You can't even go to the grocery store and
00:04know if it's American or where in the world it came from, where they have
00:08different laws that govern food safety. Oh, but it says USDA. Well, that must be
00:15USA. No, that is not USA beef. Let me talk about some of the things that I've
00:21done since I've been in Congress. In 2014, working with Jared Polis again here,
00:27well, wait, wait, wait, that's a dirty word, across the aisle. You shouldn't be
00:31working across the aisle, Congressman Massey. Don't do that. We got to have a
00:35bunch of fake bills that go down party lines that we can use against the other
00:39party in this next election. We don't want anything, and whatever you do,
00:44don't co-sponsor some Democrats bill. You're just giving credence to to the
00:48other side, to the other viewpoint. Well, I ignored that and I worked with Earl
00:53Blumenauer and Jared Polis, and we got the hemp bill in the farm bill. And I'm
01:00not afraid to tell you, I did a little R&D to come up with that hemp bill. I
01:05ripped off and duplicated it. That's what R&D stands for. I ripped off and
01:09duplicated that bill from Ron Paul, and it became a law and it created an entire
01:14industry. It was just a little thing in the farm bill. Just a little pilot program
01:19that grew into an industry that helped my state, Kentucky, created an industry
01:23that's at least a billion dollars in Kentucky. Well, now they're trying to
01:26destroy it, but that's another, that's for another day. What am I doing now too?
01:32Right now, that was in 2014. Have you heard about this beef product, ground beef
01:38product that's going to come from a foreign country at 75% of market price? How do you
01:43get something at 75% of market price? Well, I can tell you what, it ain't grade A
01:48prime if it's 75% of market price. Somebody else didn't want to buy it. And
01:53that's what they're talking about bringing 300,000 metric tons. They tell you in tons,
01:59so you don't realize that's 600 million pounds. That's a billion, that's two billion
02:04quarter pounders, folks. That's how much they're going to bring here to this
02:09country. Is that going to help farmers? No, it's not going to help farmers. It was
02:14never intended to help farmers. It's not even going to help consumers because what
02:17it's going to do is going to run more farmers out of business in this country.
02:21And when we run out of the 300 metric boatloads or whatever it is of ground
02:25beef product, they won't have our own farmers here. They won't survive through
02:30these manipulations of the market. Well, the solution has been here all along since
02:352015. As a fully participating member of Congress, I introduced the Prime Act. By
02:42the way, this is back in 2015. What else happened? This body got rid of country of
02:48origin labeling for beef and pork. How did that help American farmers? You can't
02:53even go to the grocery store and know if it's American or where in the world it came
02:57from, where they have different laws that govern food safety. Oh, but it says USDA. Well, that
03:04must be USA. No, that is not USA beef. So what was my solution? It's called the Prime
03:13Act. I say it's my solution, but I got to give credit to Shelley Pingree. Across the
03:17aisle. Oh man, there's that dirty word again. Across the aisle. Working with
03:22Democrats on a bill that could help farmers and consumers. What does the Prime
03:26Act do? It says, you know what? If you're a small farmer and a small processor and
03:32you're not crossing state lines and you're raising your healthy beef right
03:36there in your own county and you want to sell it to a neighbor in your own county,
03:40your own state, you can use a local processor. And as long as the state or a
03:45county health inspector is watching that process, you don't need the federal
03:49government there. You don't need a million dollars regulation at a company
03:54that has 10 employees. They cut up more meat at the at the steakhouse down the
04:01street in a day than most of these processors cut up in a week. They don't
04:05have a USDA inspector. You don't need a USDA inspector. You just need local
04:10inspection like free restaurants. So that's the bill that Shelley Pingree and I
04:13came up with as fully participating members of Congress in 2015 in response to
04:19the repeal of the country of origin labeling, which I voted against the repeal. By
04:23the way, your cell phone's labeled, your suits labeled, your shoes are labeled, your car's
04:29labeled. Everything's labeled with country of origin except for beef and pork. Why is
04:34that? Because there's some greedy corporations that convinced the World
04:39Trade Organization and this body to get rid of those labels so they could sell you
04:44foreign food and make you think it was USDA because it has USDA label on it. Where is
04:51the Prime Act right now? Well, Massey, that was a great idea, but you didn't do
04:55anything with it. Oh, no. You all voted for it. It's in the it's in the farm bill. It's
05:01in the House farm bill. I worked hard across the aisle with the chairman of that
05:06committee and he did town halls across the country and found out that this is
05:11what people want and this would solve two problems. It would three problems. It
05:15would lower the price of food in the supermarket. It would make our farmers
05:19more successful and the quality of what you eat would go up. That's what I've
05:24done as a fully participating member of Congress. You know what else I remember
05:29doing as a fully participating member of Congress? I stood at this microphone on
05:35the night the big budget-busting bill passed. Some people called it beautiful. I
05:46said, from this podium, we are not rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic for
05:52this country. We are putting coal in the boiler and setting a course for the
05:57iceberg. I said, if you look, I like to cut taxes. Two of my bills were in the big
06:03bill. No tax on tips and reducing tax for senior citizens on Social Security. Why
06:11not? Massey, why wouldn't you vote for that? Because I refuse to lie to my
06:15constituents. I refuse to lie to them. I'm not going to tell them that you can cut
06:22taxes and increase spending and the debt will go down. That's a lie. You could, no
06:29grade schooler who's done the least bit of math would believe it. But we, some of
06:35my colleagues stood here and told that lie and I wasn't willing to tell it and I
06:40wasn't willing to vote for it. I said it would cause massive inflation. On that night
06:44over a year ago when I gave my speech, I said the bond market is also going to
06:49react poorly to this. Interest rates will go up because they see we are not serious
06:54about dealing with the debt. They see that one day we are going to default. And I
07:00called a spade a spade and I voted against the big beautiful bill and I'm
07:03proud that I did. Because it's a terrible bill and it's what's caused this
07:09inflation. Part of what's caused this inflation. Let me tell you something else
07:14I've done here over the years. I worked with my colleague from California, Zoe
07:18Lofgren, on privacy. You know you're being spied on by our own country without a
07:24warrant and contravention of the U.S. Constitution. Zoe Lofgren and I got an
07:30amendment passed many years ago into the appropriations bill to ban that. Well the
07:36Senate threw it in the trash. But we can't control what the Senate does. And
07:41that's one thing that I got done. I've been here as a fully participating member
07:46of Congress. The sole voice for inventors on the Judiciary Committee. I've
07:53introduced pro patent legislation, pro small business legislation. There's this
08:01misunderstanding. People think, oh, Apple, Google, Microsoft. They just use those
08:06inventions to keep the little guys from getting into their markets. No. Apple,
08:12Google, Microsoft. They're slow moving. They got employees there. I mean they got
08:16some good ones but a lot of them are just punching the clock. They've
08:19accumulated some weight. The fast nimble companies. The people in their garages.
08:25Little girls at science fairs invent things that even Google or Apple couldn't
08:30think of. And then when they patent them, Google and Apple do everything they can to
08:36steal the idea. To invalidate the patent. And I have worked for the small inventors
08:42to make it a level playing field so that the little guys can compete. So that their
08:46patents won't get stolen by the big guys. I've been doing that for as long as I've
08:51been in Congress. I got a bipartisan bill passed here recently just this spring to
09:00improve the reporting of the NICS database. This is the background check
09:04that they do on whether you could before you can buy the gun or not. Well guess
09:08what? The error rate there is astounding. There's a hundred thousand false denials of
09:14the Second Amendment rights of people every year the DOJ has admitted. And they only
09:19prosecute about twelve of them every year. Why is that? Because most of them are
09:22false denials. But here's one thing I discovered. If your name is similar to
09:26somebody else's name, they're going to deny you. And then you got to appeal. If you
09:31don't win that first appeal, you got to go hire a lawyer. And justice, if it's delayed,
09:37it ain't justice. And so what I did, I went, I dug deeper. My friend John Lott, who's a
09:44researcher and an analyst, and he actually worked at the DOJ and got a look at this
09:49data. It turns out if you're a minority, if you are black, you're three times as
09:53likely to share a name with somebody else who has a name, who's been in prison for a
09:59year or more. Because we share names within our groups, within our ethnicities. If
10:06you're Hispanic, you're twice as likely to get falsely denied the purchase of a
10:10firearm. Because you share names with other people who are Hispanic, who have
10:15been to jail. And I don't think, whether you're Hispanic, black, white, or Asian,
10:21anybody, should be falsely denied. If a bank, banks do background checks. We should
10:27let the banks do these. If the banks had an error rate like this, that was
10:31racially prejudiced, they'd be sued out of existence. But the government gets away
10:36with it. So I got a bill passed here unanimously to report by race and
10:43ethnicity. I don't want to collect more data on Americans, but that stuff's
10:46already collected. It's on the form. Just give us the data. And I think what will
10:50happen is when we see what's really happening, when the data becomes public,
10:53there'll be an outcry to improve that database so that it's not racially biased
10:58and so that it doesn't deprive anybody of the right to carry a firearm or to keep a
11:05firearm. You know, one thing I've done here as a fully participating member of
11:11Congress is draw attention to the foreign aid. Where's your money going? Before
11:15there was Doge. By the way, let's talk about Doge a little bit. I sat here in
11:21this chamber when we were addressed at a State of Union about all of this waste
11:28and everybody stood up and clapped, oh the waste, the waste, let's get rid of the
11:32waste. These were the chairman of the committees that created the waste. There's
11:38so much cognitive dissonance at the State of Union. And I said to myself,
11:42they're clapping because they have to clap, but there's no way they're going to cut
11:45that waste. Subscribe to One India and never miss an update. Download the One India app now.
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