Farmers Should be Worried About the Increasing Powers of the FDA

“President, today I’m offering an amendment to the FDA. I’m troubled
by images of armed agents raiding Amish farms and preventing them
selling milk directly from the cow.

I think we have bigger problems in
our country than sending armed FDA agents into peaceful farmers’ land
and telling them they can’t sell milk directly from the cow.

My amendment has three parts. First, it attempts to stop the FDA’s
overzealous regulations of vitamins, food and supplements by codifying
the first amendment prohibition on prior restraint. What do I mean by
that?

The first amendment says you can’t prevent speech, even commercial
speech, in advance of the speech. You can’t tell cheerios that they
can’t say there’s a health benefit to their Cheerios.

Under our current
FDA laws, FDA says if you want to market prune juice, you can’t say that
it cures constipation.

You can’t make a health claim about a food supplement or about a
vitamin, you can do it about a pharmaceutical, but you’re not allowed to
do it about a health supplement.

I think this should change. There have been several court cases that
show this goes against not only the spirit but the letter of the law of
the First Amendment. So this amendment would change that.

This amendment would stop the FDA from censoring claims about
curative, mitigative effects of dietary supplements.

It would also stop
the FDA from prohibiting distribution of scientific articles and
publications regarding the role of nutrients in protecting against
disease.

Despite four court orders condemning the practice as a violation of
the First Amendment, the FDA continues to suppress consumers’ right to
be informed and to make informed choices by denying them this particular
information.

It’s time for Congress to put an end to FDA censorship.

Second, my amendment would disarm the FDA.

Now, some of you might be surprised the FDA is armed. Well, you shouldn’t be.

We have nearly 40 federal agencies that are armed.

I’m not against
having police, I’m not against the army, the military, the FBI, but I
think bureaucrats don’t need to be carrying weapons and I think what we
ought to do, is if there is a need for an armed policeman to be there,
the FBI who are trained to do this should do it.

But I don’t think it’s a
good idea to be arming bureaucrats to go on the farm to, with arms, to
stop people from selling milk from a cow.

I think we have too many armed federal agencies, and that we need to
put an end to this.

Criminal law seems to be increasing, increasingly is
using a tool of our government bureaucracy to punish and control honest
businessmen for simply attempting to make a living.

Historically the criminal law was intended to punish only the most
horrible offenses that everyone agreed were inherently wrong or evil,
offenses like rape, murder, theft, arson – but now we’ve basically
federalized thousands of activities and called them crimes.

If bureaucrats need to involve the police, let’s have them use the FBI, but I see no reason to have the FDA carrying weapons.

Today the criminal law is used to punish behavior such as even
fishing without a permit, packaging a product incorrectly or shipping
something with an improper label.

Simply said, the federal government’s gone too far.

The plain language of our Constitution specifies very few federal
crimes. In fact, the Constitution originally only had four federal
crimes and now we have thousands of federal crimes.

We’ve moved beyond the original intent of the Constitution. We don’t
even know or have a complete list of all the federal crimes. It’s
estimated there are over 4,000, but no one has an exact number.

Finally, my amendment will require adequate mens rea
protection. In other words, when you have a crime, you’re supposed to
prove the intent.

People have to have intended to harm someone, it can’t
be an honest mistake where a businessman or woman have broken a
regulation and didn’t intend to harm someone.

If you want to convict
someone of a crime and put them in jail, it should be a mens rea requirement.

This is something we have had for hundreds of years, it comes out of our common-law tradition.

This amendment would fix this problem by strengthening the mens rea
component of each of the prohibited acts and the FDA acts by including
the words “knowing” and “willful” before we address and accuse someone
of a crime.

This I think would give protection to folks who are guilty of
inadvertently guilty of breaking a regulation and would keep from
overflowing our jails.

We’ve got plenty of violent criminals without
putting people in for honest breaches of regulations.

If Congress is
going to criminalize conduct at the federal level as it does with the
FDA act, the least it can do have is have an adequate mens rea requirement. My amendment will attempt to do this.

It’s not that we won’t have rules at the federal level, but the rules
ought to be reasonable.

We ought to allow people to market vitamins.
There’s no earthly reason why somebody who markets prune juice can’t
advertise it helps with constipation.

We’ve gone too far, and we’ve abrogated the First Amendment and what
we need to do is tell the FDA that the courts have ruled that the First
Amendment does apply to commercial speech and the FDA has been
overstepping their bounds.”

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