National Sea Grant College Program Amendments Act of 2015
Floor Speech
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Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, the Presiding Officer and I are fairly new to this Chamber. I know Senate rules prevent me from engaging anyone who happens to be in the gallery, so I will not do that. But I have to admit, watching what has gone on here for the last 15 or 20 minutes, I can't help but think at least one or two are saying: What on Earth is going on down on that Senate floor? We have heard arguments embedded in arguments.
The issue we have before us today is on the biotechnology labeling vote. We have heard about judges. Look, everybody says we are in gridlock here. There are obviously instances where we disagree. Let's set those aside and address legislation where we do agree we have pressing issues, and we have two of those before the Senate today.
The one immediately before us is on biotechnology labeling, and I am going to get to that in a minute. The other has to do with funding Zika. It has to do with trying to understand why some 38 of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle voted for $1.1 billion in Zika funding, and now it is back before us. It is one vote away from going to the President's desk, and now they are all voting against it. Collectively, the Members who voted for the $1.1 billion and now vote against it represent States that have 671 Zika cases reported to date. It looks as if we are going to be here a little bit tonight, and I will get into the details and share the roll call vote, but today I want to talk about biotechnology.
I want to start by thanking Senator Roberts and Senator Stabenow for the work they did in reaching a bipartisan solution to this controversial issue. We voted on cloture yesterday, and we had a majority of over 60--65 to be exact-- Members vote. What cloture means is to get on the bill. Now we are on the bill. What does this bill do?
What it is trying to do is avoid the confusion and the cost when a State implements a law that becomes de facto Federal law of the land and increases the cost of food prices to consumers. This is what we are proposing to avoid in the language we have before us that I hope we vote on and I hope we focus on. This is only one choice of one State-- the State of Vermont. There are several dozen States that plan to have their own variance, and I will talk about the absurd exemptions and exceptions later on.
The bottom line: Complexity creates cost--cost to the American consumer. In Vermont alone, the Vermont law will increase the annual cost of food per family--in Vermont alone--by about $2,000 a year. There are people struggling to pay for the food they have right now. There are people trying to decide, do they pay to heat their home or eat? Now we are talking about raising food costs, for some of the poorest people, by $2,000 a year.
Complexity equates to cost. This provides clarity. I am going to talk a little bit about that, but I do appreciate Senator Roberts and Senator Stabenow for getting those of us who are willing to work together, who are willing to say to people at either end of the spectrum: Guys, we are going to come up with a compromise and solve this problem. We have that opportunity before us now, and I hope we will get to an affirmative vote later today.
As I said earlier, the state-by-state patchwork is unsustainable. Right now, we are talking about what Vermont decided to do. What about California? What about my State of North Carolina and all the other ones? Some people say: Well, you are preempting State law. When a State law affects interstate commerce across the Nation--because if I am a Campbell Soup Company or a Kellogg's or a small mom-and-pop shop trying to distribute in Vermont--if I don't get the labeling exactly right, I could be subject to millions of dollars of fines just because I have a jar or a can or a box on a shelf that isn't consistent with their labels.
I live in Charlotte, NC. Charlotte is right on the border of North Carolina and South Carolina. If you have a truck carrying cans of Campbell's soup, it has to be labeled one way in North Carolina and another in South Carolina. Does that make sense? It adds cost. It doesn't add value. That is why we are trying to prevent this patchwork of laws that could go on the books.
I want to talk a little bit about biotechnology for a minute because Senator Durbin said something that I think is very important. I sit on the Agriculture Committee. I asked all the heads of the FDA, the EPA, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture the same question in the same committee hearing several months ago. I said: Do you have any scientific data whatsoever--let's go to the FDA first, Food and Drug Administration--that would suggest that food containing biotechnology represent any threat to health? The FDA leader, appointed by the Obama administration, said: None whatsoever. Then I moved to the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency. I asked precisely the same question. I got precisely the same answer. Then I went to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. I asked precisely the same question and got precisely the same answer.
When we walk the halls here, people say: Thom, I know. I know they are safe. But for some reason we have lost the argument. Ladies and gentlemen, the reason we can't lose the argument on agricultural biotech--what some people call GMO--is that our Nation and our world's food supply rely on it. Over ninety percent of all corn grown in Iowa is grown as a result of biotech--not some sort of Frankencorn, but corn that is heat resistant, corn that is moisture resistant, fungus resistant.
If we were to roll back 30 or 40 years of progress in agriculture biotech and take it out of our food supply chain, we could literally be in a position where people will starve--maybe not in the United States but all the nations we export to--because we simply cannot produce the world's food supply if we go back 10, 20, or 30 years. So it is a very important part of our food supply, it is a safe food, it is an environmentally sound food, and it is one that we just have to understand.
Having said that, I firmly believe that everybody has the right to know what is in their food. That is why I love the compromise bill that Senator Roberts and Senator Stabenow have before us today. It is pretty simple. Again, I know I can't interact with the gallery, so I will not. But my guess is that most of the people in the gallery over the age of about 12 have a smartphone. One or two may have flip phones--and there is an alternative that I will talk about--but most probably have smartphones. As a matter of fact, 207 million people in the United States have smartphones. I know Senator Durbin is not familiar with it, but many of them come with what is called a QR code reader. I will give those watching from home a chance to actually scan it while hearing me talk live.
I remember--I think it was President Bush back in the 1990s who went through a shopping line and was astounded because he saw a bar code reader. He said: Wow, that is new technology. It had been around for a while. Guess what, folks. QR codes have been around a while. As a matter of fact, yesterday when the distinguished gentleman from Oregon spoke, he had a QR code up on the screen. I said: Heck, I want to see what that is. So I clicked on the QR code on the Campbell's can. It brought up on Wikipedia the history of the New York Yankees. But it proves the point that you can go directly from that QR code to the Internet and get the information you need in real time.
What is the other advantage of QR codes? You can board an airplane with them, you can get information about your fuel, you can get medical services. It is everywhere. It is ubiquitous. It is prevalent. Everywhere you go, you see them. When I go to the store, because my wife is pretty strict on how much money I can spend, I will scan a QR code to see if I can find a comparative shop, and maybe I need to go down the street to buy that same product. In other words, it is an integral part of our lives. For somebody to say it is new, weird, different, hard to use--it only takes one button, one click on your phone, to actually get to the rich information on the Internet. That is what this bill is about.
So what if that QR code is on the product--a can of soup, a bag of flour, or any product you buy in the grocery store that is subject to this law. You go to your phone, you hit QR code reader which is on your smartphone, and it would immediately bring you to a website. This is what this proposed law requires. It immediately brings you to a website, in the cases I have done it, in 2 or 3 seconds. The minute you get to the site, you get all kinds of information. You get nutritional information, caloric value, and all kinds of things you need to know about what is in your food. Right on the page you can click down, and you can see whether it has any agriculture biotech content. Then you can even draw down further and find out what that means. It is in this bill. It can be done. Small businesses use this. Political people use this. Everybody uses this as a way to rapidly get to the Internet.
I don't know about you all, but I think this Internet thing is going to take off. I think it is going to be here for a while. So I think we are going to be increasingly comfortable with this sort of way to get the richest information available on the food we are going to eat. For those who say this is some sort of weird code or outdated, I don't know about you all, but that is not the world I live in. I think it is a very effective way to get it.
Let's assume you are a small business and you don't have the ability to create a QR code. Frankly, I would tell that small business to do it because that creates a competitive advantage. That makes you look as big as Campbell Soup Company and lets you compete. It is easy to put up a website. Most of us have them or know how to get them up pretty easily. I can put one up in 2 or 3 hours and then have a QR code to go to it. But let's assume they don't want to do it. It is a mom-and-pop shop, and they just don't like QR code readers. You can have a 1-800 number if you satisfy certain thresholds: For more product information, call this number. And they have a statutory obligation to disclose to you the contents of the food and whether or not it has any agriculture biotech products in it. If you don't want to do a 1-800 number, you can also do a simple Web address. Key in thomscornerstore.com, or whatever, and get to the same information.
The fact is, this bill does that. It fully discloses and creates a statutory requirement that says the food manufacturer must disclose the content of their food, the nutritional information, biotech content, et cetera.
It is mandatory. There were disagreements on our side because we had Members on our side of the aisle who said they didn't like ``mandatory.'' We decided in the interest of compromise to accept the mandatory requirement. It takes 2 years before the rules are made and about 3 years before most businesses will have to be fully phased in. Quite honestly, most manufacturers are going to do it because they understand, as I do, the advantage of quick access to having a consumer get to their Web presence, and there are other things they can do once they get there.
We know that the QR code, the URLs, and the 1-800 numbers work. We know that everybody has the right to know what is in their food. This law mandates that this happens. It eliminates the absurd exceptions and exemptions. For anybody who wants to do this, I know this code works. If you are at home right now and you see this code, you should be able to take your QR code scanner and go up to your TV, like I did yesterday, and go to this website and see in real time what I just demonstrated on the prior slide.
Why do we need to do this? Why do we need a Federal consistent framework for doing this? Why is it the Federal Government's responsibility to get involved in this? Going back to the first slide, I don't want families in Vermont to pay an additional $2,000 a year for their food. I don't want families in North Carolina to pay an additional $1,100 a year for the same food they bought last year only because of these state mandated labeling requirements.
Let me give you a couple of examples of what I am talking about in the Vermont law. Imagine if this were multiplied by 2-dozen or 3-dozen other States. Frozen pepperoni pizza is exempt from the Vermont law. Frozen cheese pizza has to be labeled. Vegetable beef soup is exempt from the Vermont law. Vegetable soup has to be labeled. Multiply that by dozens and dozens of other States. Think about all of these absurd exceptions and exemptions that can occur if we have 50 statehouses trying to create a patchwork of laws.
For an American family, the Vermont law will add an additional cost of about $1,200 a year to the grocery bill. Imagine if we had 24 or 36 different States that we had to interpret, the cost would go up. The food is no more nutritious. It just costs more. That is why we need a Federal standard.
To my friends on the other side of the aisle and a handful on this side of the aisle, folks, this is just common sense. Anybody should be able to figure this out on 8 hours of sleep. This is not a difficult decision. We need to solve this problem now. Then we need to get on to Zika, which I will come back and talk about a little bit later on, and then we can get to all the other myriad of things we need to get done here.
When I came here in January of last year, I was accustomed to getting things done in the North Carolina House. This is an opportunity to get something done that makes sense, that removes the threat of raising food costs and not producing one iota of positive difference in health outcomes. I hope my friends on both sides of the aisle recognize that this is an opportunity where we can prove to the people in this gallery and the people in this Nation that we can actually get things done.
This is a compromise. This is something my friends on the right do not necessarily like and I know some of my friends on the left don't like, but it is right. It is necessary now so we can protect the people who don't know that, if this bill doesn't get passed, they are going to be paying more for food for no more value.
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Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I thank my colleague for once again reinforcing why it is so important for us to get this compromise bill-- this bipartisan bill on agriculture biotech--to the President's desk so we can move on to take on other matters, and that is one of the matters I want to talk about now.
Again, I know that when we come into this Chamber and are on C-SPAN, sometimes for people who are watching or may be in the gallery, it is hard to understand some of what we are talking about. What I am talking about is a bill that I hope we vote on next week. It is a bill that in two separate measures went to the House with strong bipartisan support. Now it is coming back in what we call a conference report, and we are one vote away from potentially sending this bill to the President's desk. It has two parts. I am going to speak predominantly on the second part, but the first part has to do with funding our veterans.
I come from the State of North Carolina. We have a population of 10 million. Ten percent of our State--nearly 1 million of our citizens-- are veterans. We are very proud of our military tradition, and we are certainly proud of those who have decided to call North Carolina their home after their military service. As a matter of fact, I think everybody in the Senate--Democrats and Republicans--has veterans as a priority. I firmly believe that. That, I guess, is one of the reasons I am stunned that we have reached an impasse in moving forward and providing appropriations that will let us increase funding to veterans.
The bill that we seem not to be able to get consensus on--although we had consensus when we first sent it out of this Chamber--provides critical funding for veterans housing, for their disability compensation, for suicide hotlines, for treatment for PTSD, and for opioid addiction treatment. For all the promises that we are not keeping today, we can help fulfill those promises by providing the desperately needed funding the VA needs.
But instead of working to get this funding done, we are at an impasse now, and I simply don't understand it. To me, some of them may be genuine disagreements with the policy, but in some respects it feels a little bit like scoring political points, and I don't get it.
What I really want to talk about tonight is the other provision of the bill, and that has to do with something that is desperately needed in our Nation. It is funding--and taking seriously--the threat of the Zika virus.
Zika is here. We are in mosquito season. I went hiking this weekend, and I know mosquitoes are out in North Carolina. In fact, they are all over the Nation. We need to work quickly to get a vaccine. We need it desperately. We are told by the CDC we could be 18 months away from having a vaccine for Zika. What we need to do is make sure we are funding research efforts so that we can win the fight against Zika. But I will tell you, we can't do this without providing financial support.
As I said before, the Senate passed a bill earlier this year, and we sent it to the House. Now it is back in the Senate, and it is one vote away from going to the President's desk. The bill spends over $1 billion to fight Zika in all of its forms, and my Democratic friends voted for this bill earlier in the spring at the same funding level we talked about. There is discussion about spending more, but it seems illogical that we would spend nothing at all. That seems to be the position that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are taking right now.
We stand ready as Republicans in the majority to provide this funding, but it appears as though, because we have reached this political impasse, we could put Americans' health and safety at risk.
Again, we have a rollcall vote from earlier this year where most of us--virtually all of us--voted for $1.1 billion in funding. I will talk a little later about what that funding was directed toward. We have Members who voted with us on that bill who are not willing to vote now to send this to the President's desk.
I am going to submit for the record the list of people who voted for this bill the last time it was on the floor and are now voting against it. I am not going to spend time today with limited time to go through each of the Members. But it doesn't make sense to me when you have cases reported--5 cases in Colorado--yet we have someone opposing the bill. There are 24 cases in Pennsylvania, and before they supported it, and now they are opposing it. There are 27 cases in Virginia, 26 cases in Maryland, 52 cases in California, and 198 cases in New York, for a total of 671 cases that have been reported to date in the United States. Most of these are travel related, but we have the threat of sexual transmission. Now that we are in the height of mosquito season, we have the real threat of mosquitoes infecting American citizens, and the threat is real. Without going through the whole list, Florida is another example, with 162 cases reported already. It would seem to me that the Senators from Florida would want to get this funding to the President's desk so we can start solving the problem.
Again, Members who now oppose this funding voted for it just a couple of months ago. Again, if you add up the numbers, that is 671 cases solely in the States where Members now are opposing the bill, and the cases are growing. We now seem to be engaged in this political divide, which really is the Senate at its worst, and we are better than that.
I know there are a lot of reasons that have been put forth to oppose it in this version where they weren't against it before. There were some that said it is because we are not funding or we are preventing funding for certain organizations. It is not true. The funding can flow through Medicaid to any organization which provides health services that would be relevant to the disease.
The way you control the population of the mosquitoes that can potentially carry the disease is to kill them--to kill them where they breed. Right now we think, temporarily, for this mosquito season we should do whatever we can to make sure that we kill the potential source of the disease that is transmitted through these mosquitoes. It can be done. It can be done with chemicals the World Health Organization says is safe in so many other jurisdictions. All we are saying is during this mosquito season, before we get a vaccine, we use this chemical--this compound--that can kill Zika mosquitoes and prevent them from transmitting the disease. That doesn't seem like an unreasonable thing to do. For 180 days, allow us to try to dramatically reduce the threat to the population. These are commonsense policies.
The fact that we are having this discussion, the fact that we can't get it, the fact that time is running out and we have to get it done next week is ridiculous. We are well into the mosquito season. There is probably not anybody listening to this or in this Chamber right now that has not been bitten by a mosquito already this year.
Let's do what we have to do to keep America safe. Let's stop the partisan politics. Let's get this bill to the President's desk, and then let's move on to the many other things the American people expect us to tackle while we remain in session.
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