On top of that, within this legislation, those seven producers—that monopoly—has made sure for themselves to excuse themselves from following the very regulation they’re asking you to vote today when they’re selling eggs that are no longer in the shells. Does that make any sense? Why should they get a free pass when the eggs are in a bag instead of in a carton? It’s unjust. It’s unfair. It’s wrong.
Then they asked for a carve-out to make sure that nobody from other states can send their eggs here unless they too have spent the added expense. Makes sense. I would love to pass legislation here that forces Michigan consumers to only buy milk from Michigan farms. That would be awesome for me, okay? Wouldn’t it be great for Ford Motor Company to get us to pass a law that says the only cars you can buy in this state have to have a blue oval emblem on the front of them? Boy that would be really great for Michigan wouldn’t it? Or maybe you’d rather us have a GMC on the front, whatever it is. This is what we are talking about today. This is what you are posed with voting with on an otherwise good bill package. The end of this bill, the last ten pages or so, is the poison pill. It is the bad egg. As I detailed to you yesterday, the Interstate Commerce Clause is clear. Not to mention just the bad economic policy as I previously stated.
And so often, when we discuss policy here, we are confronted with this; we create artificial deadlines. All the time, you know that, we’re always creating artificial deadlines here. Those deadlines then, we hold up to everybody and say, “We’ve got to do it by this date or something else is going to happen bad, so hurry up; help me out, you don’t have time to think about an alternative, don’t have time to bring a substitute in, don’t have time to amend this, don’t have time to have different talks. We already had talks, we already had the group together, we’ve met for a couple of years, we had agreements. You’re violating our agreements. You’re throwing a monkey wrench into the whole thing.” That’s the usual practice around here. This is no different. Those are all artificial constructs. We have to recognize that we can’t vote for bad policy just because some group says, “Well, we agreed to it.”
The truth is, they agreed to the bad policy in 2009. That policy, as the previous speaker mentioned, means they’re supposed to do something next year, that their industry now says isn’t even good enough anyway, so they’ve got to further change that by 2025. We’re putting the industry standard into law by 2025. And just for the comfort of those who are worried about extending the previous practice that was outlawed in 2009 for next year, everybody’s already changed. There’s nobody using those battery cages to any real extent anymore, anyway. They’re already adopted. They just need more time now to adapt to the 2025 standard. We don’t need to put this in law. By repealing the 2009 act, as I suggested yesterday, we would allow the industry to police itself, and they’re already all members of that industry; they would have nowhere else to go. So this remains flagrantly unnecessary law. It is unnecessary for us to do this, and it’s a bad precedent to set going forward in the future.
We continue, in the agriculture world, to be very deferential people, and so dairy farmers come along, a beef producer comes along, and says, “Here’s what my industry needs,” but somebody from another industry comes to me, poultry, eggs, ducks, whatever you want to talk about. I don’t know much about those things. And so it’s very easy within the agriculture community to say, “Whatever your guys need, fine, we can get there, as long as you’re there for me when I need you.” And so, this sense that somehow the agriculture community is for this, so therefore it’s okay, because I want to support my farmers, this is merely the present circumstance that agriculture finds itself in, nationwide, of being so small in numbers nowadays that we can’t make for ourselves a lot of headway without the support of other groups. And so we labor hard then, to get along, to work together, to try to watch out for each other’s best interests and to try to not be argumentative, especially publicly. But yet, these folks who have made this bad deal, and those who are willing to go along with it, are unwilling to acknowledge that the devil will come back for the rest of us. He’s not going to just walk away and say, “Well, I’ve got the chickens, I’m all set now.” It’ll be the cows, it’ll be the ducks, it’ll be the rest of agriculture, because their ultimate goal continues to be to eliminate animal agriculture.
So what are you getting a chance to do today? You’re getting a chance to vote on some good policy changes regarding the Animal Industry Act. Things that are mostly already being done by law because of executive orders and things like that. It’s not a bad bill. Until you get to those last ten pages. And there’s where we can’t allow this to go forward. That’s why I can’t vote for this. We are not doing agriculture any favors today. We are not doing consumers any favors today. We’re doing some favors, very specifically, for some people who have made a very bad deal, that I don’t believe they fully comprehend, just how the price that they will pay has not been fully called for yet. They’ve sold their soul and the devil will come to collect eventually. But meanwhile, the collateral damage is real. You are voting today to raise agriculture prices if you vote “yes”. You are voting against good animal husbandry practices today if you vote “yes”. You are voting to endanger other good animal husbandry practices as collateral damage today, if you vote “yes”. You are voting today to violate the principles of the Interstate Commerce Clause, if you vote “yes”. You are voting today, if you vote “yes”, to further entangle the Legislature, because when the next deadline comes up, and not a made-up one, but a real one that you’re voting on today for 2025, that deadline is going to have a problem too. Somebody’s going to say, “Cage-free is not actually cage-free.” I don’t know if you’ve heard that, Madam President, but this whole principal about cage-free, is not really cage-free. It’s not like the chickens are all running free and wild. They’re still in cages. They just happen to be large cages, with a lot of chickens packed into them, rather than small cages with only one chicken in them. So don’t fool yourself – the chickens are still in cages.
So I encourage you to vote “no.” I encourage you to consider not being bullied. I encourage you to vote for your consumers by voting “no” and by forcing this issue to be negotiated with genuine interest of agriculture, rather than the small interests of a few who have poisoned an otherwise good policy bill.
The following bill was read a third time:
Senate Bill No. 179, entitled
A bill to amend 1965 PA 232, entitled “Agricultural commodities marketing act,” by amending section 2 (MCL 290.652), as amended by 2002 PA 601.
The question being on the passage of the bill,
The bill was passed, a majority of the members serving voting therefor, as follows: