Sherrod Brown: “We in this country for a long time, for a lot of years, have raised our living standards with pure food laws, with…”

“We in this country for a long time, for a lot of years, have raised our living standards with pure food laws, with strong clean air laws, with good, solid safe drinking water laws, on fights that were conducted in this Chamber, where often groups of very conservative Members that had major backing from the largest corporations in the country would oppose clean water laws, would oppose safe drinking laws, would oppose pure food laws. Over a period of decades after decades after decades, beginning in the early part of this century when books were written about contaminated food and all the problems with our food supply, over those many, many years, we have built probably the best standards to protect all people in this country; not just the rich, not just the poor, not just white, not just black, not just men, not just women, everyone. We have protected people because they know when they go to the grocery store that meat is inspected. They know that there are clean air and clean water requirements. We know when we go shopping that the food we buy is generally, almost 100 percent of the time, good, clean, safe food. What we are doing is we are having our standards pulled down by a country that has not had those kinds of protections built into their laws, and has not had that kind of history.”