Kendrick Meek: “I hear what the problem is here, but I want to say to America that we have to oppose this amendment. We have to oppose…”

“I hear what the problem is here, but I want to say to America that we have to oppose this amendment. We have to oppose it because if the people who are proponents of this amendment want to cure this problem of tobacco, we all admit that it is very bad, let us make tobacco illegal. Let us make it illegal. That will cure all the things we have heard here today. It will stop it. But I tell my colleagues what we need to keep going, and that is these small farmers that are farming tobacco. And I say this every time. My father was a tobacco farmer. Honest man. The only place he could get any work was on a tobacco farm. I will never forget that. I know that was an opportunity for him, just as it is an opportunity now for the small farmer. It was an opportunity for the farmers when the hurricane that devastated farmers in my district had everything wiped out. If it were not for crop insurance, they could not have survived. If it were not for crop insurance, the orange growers in Florida would not have survived. We do not see those people. They are not here. They do not dress like we do. They do not talk like we do. They need their insurance to keep their families fed. I say to my colleagues that we must oppose this amendment because of that, survival for the small farmer.”