Washington loves a deadline.
And if you spend enough time there, you learn the weeks before one are generally when you should start paying more attention, not less.
The Senate returns September 14. The current Farm Bill extension expires September 30, and Senate Agriculture Chairman John Boozman has said he intends to bring Farm Bill 2.0 back up shortly after lawmakers return, after it failed to advance out of committee in August.
For the moment, the pesticide liability language that caused such an uproar earlier this year is out. (Thank you to everyone who contributed to that happening by throwing a well-justified fit.) The House stripped those provisions from its bill after Anna Paulina Luna forced the issue in April, and the Senate proposal does NOT contain a comparable liability shield - yet.
That’s very good news. I’m just not declaring victory while Congress is still engaging with the bill.
Which makes my recent conversation with Jennifer Galardi and Jay Richards on RAW particularly well-timed.
We talked about the story behind my recent confession, the autism moms who came into my Senate office more than twenty years ago, the RFK Jr. meeting I later routed away from the Trump White House, and the very long road from true believer in our public-health institutions to asking considerably more uncomfortable questions about them.
But we also got into something especially relevant to the Farm Bill fight: incentives.
Markets depend on transparency, meaningful choice, accountability and some avenue of recourse when a product causes harm. Start removing those things and eventually you have to ask what mechanism is left to keep the system honest. That was the point we kept coming back to, and why I said creating that kind of liability structure around another class of products would be “the height of public health malpractice.”
We also covered informed consent, FDA labels, hospital food, and why people who publicly admit they got something wrong should probably be encouraged rather than beaten back into silence.
The whole conversation is below.
Take a listen and let me know what you think.