Five.
I think you have care CD Talk station a very happy Wednesday, extra special Wednesday.
And of course I always.
Call my favorite hour radio here on the fifty five here see morning show when we get to here from Congressman MASSI followed by Judge Jennena Paulatana, who may be very well be listening. Welcome back, Congressman Massy. Always a distinct pleasure to have you on my program.
Great to be on your show again, Brian, don't know where to start.
I want to start with Terris, but I know we got other things to talk about, so let's start with and you can explain to my listeners the Dual Loyalty Disclosure Act, which I know is on your short list today.
Sure.
So this is a bill I introduced just last week, and it says that when you file to run for a federal office, if you are a citizen of another country as well as the United States, that you have to disclose that. And the concern here is that we may have members of Congress who are citizens of other countries and therefore have to other countries. When you are sworn into office, you take an oath to the US Constitution. We want to know who else you're obligated to. And
people say, is this ever happened? How do you know there are members of Congress with dual loyalty. Well, it's hard to know. That's why we have the bill. But sometimes when they run for president, we find out or they find out that they do have citizenship in another country.
The two conservative examples I can give you was that I think it was Michelle Bachman had a citizenship in Switzerland and Ted Cruz had citizenship in Canada, and they both renounced their citizenship, which I think is what you should do. And by the way, my personal preference is
that you only have citizenship in the United States. But I thought it would be easier to get a bill passed that requires you to close it and then the voters can decide whether you should be a dual citizen serving in Congress.
Well, I think that makes perfect sense. I one of my dear friends from you know, high school age married a French girl, and he's been living in France now for the past thirty at least thirty, maybe forty years, and I know he considers himself more French than a US citizen. He's critical of US government, its policies and some even some of the freedoms we enjoy. So I know where his loyalties lie, so it stands to reason that they could be could certainly something like that could happen.
So the big question is who would be against this common sense proposal?
Congressman Massy nobody should be against it.
I don't know yet, although I've only got I think four co sponsors for it, Clay Higgins, Marjorie Taylor Green, and one of the I think Andy Biggs, and somebody else joined here recently. So if you're listening to this show and I'm not your congressman, please call their office and ask them to co sponsor this bill.
All right, I guess is it in committee right now? I know these things have to come out of committee in order to be advanced to the floor, and of course needs to be put up for vote on the floor.
So where are we in process?
So it's I introduced it so recently that I'm not sure that it's if it's been referred to a committee yet, And sometimes they're referred to more than one committee, but this is such a short bill, I think it would just go to one committee, and it would be the committee that oversees election law, and I'm not sure which
one that is. It's not one that I serve on because the way I structured this bill is it requires an FEC disclosure, just like when you file to run for office, you have to disclose your financial you have to give financial statements. So it's just one more thing that you have to disclose when you run for office.
Okay, fair enough.
Pivoting over to something that it really really gets under my skin, the idea that I can't find out and can't see from labeling where it is that my food has been manufactured. Country of origin labeling. We used to have that at some point, didn't we, And somewhere along the lines that got eradicated.
Well, listen, your phone has the country of origin label, Your car on the sticker has country of origin label. Your shoes, your suit, your socks. You can know which country, your tools, which country those things came from. Except now with beef and pork, since twenty fifteen, when Congress removed the requirement to label the country of origin on beef and pork, you can't necessarily know.
And what's more is a lot of times this stuff will.
Be stamped USDA US Department of agriculture, and people read that label and they think, oh, this has made the USA no that could be from any country in the world. So I think we made a mistake in twenty fifteen when we removed country of origin labeling for beef and pork. I fought it tooth and nail. I lost the argument because they came to us and said, oh, the World Trade Organization has ruled against you in a suit from
Canada and Mexico. Well the suit was really, I believe brought by the meat packers who want to be able to sell you meat from anywhere in the world and put that USDA label on it make you think it came from the United States. And in any case, the World Trade Organization, in my opinion, does not have authority over Congress. I can't find them in the constitution right any kind of superior court. In fact, even the Supreme Court is a co equal branch with the legislative branch
according to our constitution. So I don't believe we have to follow World Trade Organization. But here's what the World Trade Organization said in twenty fifteen. They said that Canada and Mexico can impose retaliatory tariffs on your farmers if you keep requiring country of origin labeling. So that was enough to scare enough of my colleagues into removing country of origin laboring. Here. The thought just occurred to me, though, when Trump put these tariffs on, and now we got
all these other countries and they're going to reciprocate with terror. Okay, if we're in a full blown trade war or trade dispute, go ahead and put the labels back on.
I mean, this is part of the deal.
Let's get back the territory we lost and label our dagone food about where it came from. Well, one more, go ahead, one more thing. While I'm on this topic. The US Olympic Association even advised Olympic athletes to be careful about eating meat in China and in Mexico because even though they do ban the use of anabolic steroids and their animals, they're still using them. There's no enforcement, and so you could eat that meat and fail a drug tast at the olmpage.
Oh my god. Well, and you just illustrate a great point. First off, I wasn't aware of the reality of what you just told me. So now I am a more informed consumer, and I was just making the point earlier when I saw the topics of conversation, most notably on
this one. If I'm standing at the supermarket and I've got a pile of ground beef in front of me, and it's labeled, you know, manufactured, raised, you know, all United States processed, and I got another pile of meat that doesn't have anything related to that that, I'm left to guess. I wonder where that came from. Do they have the same safety standards as we do. It's the same level of uh, you know, oversight in those countries, and that allows me to make an informed decision.
And plus, perhaps I.
Would just like to support the American farmer and buy United States grown and processed beef.
That's here's what's more of that.
That mystery pile of beef, it's probably it's certainly.
Going to say USDA on it. So the average.
Consumer is going to think that the mystery pile, the mystery meat is from the USA, but the USDA label does not imply that. And the other thing is it may say product of the USA. Just because they grounded up in the United.
States, process processed in the United States does not mean that that meat was grown here.
Correct.
So this is something there are some various bills on this in the Senate. In the House, I'm looking at drafting my own bill to reinstitute country of origin labeling. And you know, the libertarian argument here is buyer beware and if you know, if the consumers want to buy the mystery meat, let them buy the mission. But but I'm a constitutionalist here, and we have the authority Congress does to regulate trade when it comes across the border.
And I think you know, even the Founders endowed Congress with the ability to set standards for weights and measures. That's in Article one, Section eight, the Directive toward Congress. You know, so that a pound weighs a pound whether you're buying it in Kentucky or Ohio.
So this falls under.
Both of those categories, the ability for Congress to set standards and also the ability to regulate commerce with other countries. And it's really no extra imposition to put that on the label. There are some who would say it is, but the.
Consumers have the right to know we do.
And there's something that I always look at for and I've noticed that quite often you will see, at least in so far as seafood is concerned. You'll see country of origin on seafood. Like, I do not want to buy farm raised shrimp from Vietnam or China or Malaysia or wherever the hell it comes from. I want Gulf of Fill in the Black Mexico, United States wild caught shrimp and you can find it.
You want to know why.
That is why because the seafood lobby is not as powerful as the meat processing lobby, and so you still have to label the country of origin on seafood for poultry, and there's not a whole.
Lot of post processing.
On seafood, so you know, you can generally eat it as eat it or sell it as it came out of the ocean a lot of times. And so you don't have that same oligarchy that controls the seafood industry that you do in the beef and pork industry.
Oh that is it's just to still have to label it.
So if they had more money and could pay off lobbyists and congress people elected officials, then I wouldn't be able to know where my shrimp came from. That's really what this comes down to.
That is what it comes down to.
Brother always telling it like it is, Congress and Messi, let's pause. We'll bring you back because I do want to talk a little bit about tariffs and a couple other topics that I know you're usually fair game for pretty much anything. Let's pause, and let me take nineteen fifty five KERCD Talk Station Brian Thomas with Congressman Thomas mass Always a wonderful thing to having Congress Massi on
the program. Always even made better because Judge of Poultana follows, and we'll be talking with Judge of Platano on tariffs. And he points out in his column that these tariffs were implemented or asserted by Donald Trump pursued to the International Economic Emergency Powers Act of nineteen seventy seven, which permits the President to impose tariffs on goods coming from outside the US in the case of economic emergency. And he initially cited the fentanyl crisis with regard to the
twenty five percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico. And I think we can easily agree that fentanyl is a bit of a crisis. But moving over, apparently that had broader implications than originally intended, and so he cited this economic imbalance this trade deficit we have with so many countries, as the predicate the emergency to trigger them, but we apparently have been experiencing a trade imbalanced since nineteen thirty one, which according to the judge anyway, and I suppose people
are free to have their own conclusions on it. This isn't a sudden or unexpected event. Ergo, it's not an emergency. And I know some of the Democrats are trying to advance legislation to block the tariffs, nullifying the emergency authority. Trump sided to an Act of Tariffs by Representatives Meeks and Larson and Neil, all Democrats. Where is Congressman Massey on this?
This is great And by the way, everything you said is correct. So the President declared a national emergency in order to invoke these tariffs. Now, under the National Emergencies Act, there's an expedited way to bring a vote to the floor to countermand the president's declaration of an emergency. If Congress says, no, you know what, this is not an emergency, We're going to have a vote on it. And the way you do it doesn't even require the Speaker of
the House's permission. And so what the Democrats are trying to do. Now here's where the nefariot stuff happens. Because I was in the center of the sausage factory last Congress. I served on the Rules Committee where they.
I think they're skirting the law.
The law says, if the President declares the national emergency, then anybody in Congress can bring a bill to the
floor undoing the national emergency without Speaker's permission. But what they do is in the Rules Committee they insert a little bit of text in one of these big resolutions that says, oh, by the way, that National Emergency Act thing that this Congressman is trying to bring to the floor, it's not his resolution isn't in the right order, and so we're going to turn it off using this procedural slide of hand. And then my colleagues they vote for this rule, let's say, the rule that brings the big
beautiful bill to the floor. Well, inside of that, they've get this provision to turn off the National Emergencies Act privileges for whoever's trying to bring the bill to the floor, so they can stop the bill from coming to the floor, even though the law says the bill needs to come to the floor. They can use a rule, this procedural resolution in Congress to stop a vote on that bill. They have done this once already, and I was the
only Republican to vote against that procedural resolution. I may have been one of ten who actually knew it was. Inside of that procedural r they were turning off privileges under the National Emergencies Act. So they've already once stopped a vote on the emergency that enables the tariffs. They've already once stopped it, and that was about three weeks ago, and I think they'll do the same thing again.
They use the Rules Committee to do this.
Last Congress, I served on the Rules Committee, and before I got on the Rules Committee, I said, if you pull this crap on anything, whether it's War Powers Act they do it on War Powers Act too, or anything, I will blow the whistle and I will vote no in the Rules Committee. And so they never did it. They didn't pull these tricks for the two years I was on the Rules Committee. But they're back to their old ways.
So I guess where do you see this going? I mean, regardless of what whether you're in favor of the East tariffs, do you think they're gonna go dood or do economic damage?
Will they get away with it? In this case, they're going to.
Get away with it.
And what's more, there will be no vote. You know, at least in the Senate, they voted on this because they don't have a rules committe. In the Senate, they actually followed the National Emergency Act.
Law in the Senate.
In the House, they're going to get away with turning it off and not even having a vote because Republicans reflexibly vote for these procedural resolutions, and we're in the majority, and I may be the only one that votes against it unless I can wake up some of my colleagues. And by the way, my vote doesn't indicate whether I'm for or against the tariffs, when my vote says, bring it to the floor as the law requires, and let's vote on it. And so now I can give you
my view on tariffs. For the first one hundred and fifty years of this country, we were the whole country was funded with tariffs because we didn't have an income tax. And if you wanted to replace the income tax, like get rid of it and replace it with tariffs, I'm all in, Like I would rather have a sales tax on stuff coming from China or Canada to fund this government than to have a tax on everybody's labor in this country.
But that's not the proposal.
No, it's not there.
He's adding a tariff in addition to the income tax.
And what's more is it's not.
A broad based tariff. This is this is my other pet peeve. When you go in and you say, oh, we need to tear if the steel industry, or we need to tear if I don't know, the clothing industry.
Or the widget industry. Yeah, yeah.
The problem is the government doesn't know which widgets you should be buying more of or less of, or what the price of those widgets should be. But when they go in individually and assigned tariffs on different widgets, then they're playing, you know, like they're better than the free market. It doesn't work that way. And that's and here's what's more. It creates an industry of lobbyists. Has got done talking
about the meat packing industry lobbyists. It creates an industry of lobbyists who come to Congress and ask for exemptions for their particular industry or their particular company.
Going back to the seafood industry not having as much money as the beef and pork industry.
Yeah, so this is and I and so then it starts wasting our time in Congress because there's another group of lobbyists who evolve that come and try to get these exemptions from these terraffs for their industry. And they'll be also over at the White House lobbying the President. Hey, don't teariff our thing. Our widget does you know needs to get into the country without a tariff on it.
So we'll see how this all settles out. I honestly think you know, some people are saying that the stock market getting fidgety right now, in the bond market and all that that's due to the terraffs. I think it's due to the fact that the uncertainty of the tariffs that the president can wake up on one side of the bed and say we need to tear iff this this morning, and then tomorrow you can wake up on the other side of the bed and say we need
to tear iff that this today. Yeah, if there was certainty behind it, I think they wouldn't have to price the uncertainty in the market.
Right.
But you saw that the other day, there was this rumor going around that he was going to withdraw these tariffs that he had said he was going to impose, and the market went back up. And then he said no, no, where did that rumor come from, and the market went back down again. So there is a huge amount of uncertainty built into all this, and obviously uncertainty creates fidgety
markets and a concerned populace. Congress from Thomas Messy, your honor, Judge Ennenponto is listen, listening right now, send it awave out to you, and I'll go ahead, just real quickly.
ARCA one, section eight says Congress should be doing this, not the President, and that would give you more certainty.
Well, I guess in closing the International Economic Emergency Powers Act, much like the War's Power Act, I guess a lot of people can make an argument that that's not constitutional, because we do have the provision for a declaration of war and the Congress does have the power of the purse.
Right correct, there you are.
Whether it's constitutional or not, it is the law, and the Rules Committee is circumventing the law by saying these are not the droids you're looking for. They're saying this is not a war powers resolution, or this is not an emergency National Emergency Act resolution, and so we're going to turn it off and it's not coming to the floor.
I think that's skirting the law.
Yeah, I really do. Well. Could end up in the courts. I don't know, but you know what.
I love you, Congressome Massy for explaining this to us and revealing the sausage making process and the shenanigans that go on each and every day in Congress.
God bless you, sir.
I appreciate your willingness to come on the program and speak truth to powers I always say. And waiting in the wings, I know you're a fan. Judge Ennita Politano, Congressom Massy, best of health, my friend will talk real soon.
All right, we left you and the judge as well, so we'll talk.
To you soon. Eight twenty nine. Here fifty five krs. The Detoxication Judge of POLYTONU is up. Next, fifty five KRC the talk station