Mike Enzi: “I rise to join the chorus of support for this amendment and to thank Senator Daschle for all his efforts on its behalf.…”

“I rise to join the chorus of support for this amendment and to thank Senator Daschle for all his efforts on its behalf. Since I got to the Senate, Senator Daschle and I have been working on something I call the packer concentration. It is big business in this country that takes on the small producers of this country and beats them to a pulp. When I first got here, I was a little leery about whether that happened. I am now firmly convinced and know it happens because of the way the lobbyists come in and grind on any of these bills we pass. We did pass in the Senate country-of-origin labeling. It is part of the law right now. The USDA is supposed to be working toward putting that into place. But the packer concentration has worked on their friends in the USDA and said we have to make this so tough that nobody will want to do it. It will run up the costs so much that nobody will want to pay for it. That is kind of the status we were in for a while. We have been making a little progress on it as it got closer to having a rule published. Now we have the chance to send the instructions, it is a sense of the Senate, to send the instructions to the conference committee to say that what we did before ought to move on. We are not changing the law.”