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Floor Speech
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Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, I want to talk a few minutes about seafood.
In many respects, at least in terms of our physical health, we are what we eat, and Americans have been eating a lot more seafood, which is good for you.
A lot of people don't know this. I didn't until I researched. Ninety- four percent of the seafood sold in the United States is imported--94 percent. That is a pretty extraordinary figure. Of the various types of seafood, shrimp represents the highest volume of imports of total edible fishery products.
Given that this seafood is imported, we have to be careful. For that reason, Congress created what we call the Seafood Import Monitoring Program. I am going to call it SIMP, S-I-M-P. So if I say ``SIMP,'' you will know what I am talking about. SIMP's job is to make sure that these foreign imports are safe--safe to eat for the American people.
SIMP has jurisdiction over 13 different species groups and about-- well, over 1,100 unique species. As I said, that includes shrimp and red snapper but almost all forms of seafood that are grown overseas, are produced overseas and imported--or exported, I should say, to the United States.
Now, this sounds simple, but it is not. SIMP's job is to ask questions. SIMP wants to know how the seafood was caught. SIMP wants to know the conditions under which the seafood was farmed, if it is a domestic product. If the seafood has been processed, SIMP wants to know how it was processed, what the final form was supposed to look like and what it actually does look like.
SIMP is supposed to keep us safe. Part of the way that SIMP keeps us safe is to inspect the product--not just look at the reporting requirements that the foreign producers give to SIMP but actually look at the product, whether it is the raw seafood or whether it is processed. SIMP inspects it.
In fiscal year 2020, SIMP--once again, the Seafood Import Monitoring Program, SIMP--and its auditing team completed 1,131 investigations. That is the good news. The bad news is, that was only 1 percent--1 percent--of all of the imports.
Of the audits or investigations--the inspections, if you will--that SIMP did, about 40 percent of those were on shrimp. Of the 40 percent that SIMP did on shrimp, 35 percent were found to be not in compliance with the rules. Thirty-five percent was unsafe.
This is serious business. Unlike most of our domestic producers, a lot of the producers in foreign countries try to produce their shrimp or their seafood on the cheap. They raise the product in filthy water. They don't have rigorous standards for processing the product if they take the raw product and turn it into a final product. Oftentimes, many of these foreign producers shoot the shrimp and other forms of seafood, like red snapper, with antibiotics, which, of course, if you eat enough of them, makes you resistant to those antibiotics if you get sick in another way that the antibiotics could cure.
I mean, let me just be blunt. Some of this product is unsafe. It will make you grow an extra ear. And that is why we have SIMP, is to say: Wait a minute. You can't sell this in the United States.
Once again, of the 1,100-and-change inspections that SIMP did in fiscal year 2020, 40 percent were shrimp, and SIMP found that 35 percent of that 40 percent failed the test.
SIMP is able to inspect, as I said, 1 percent of this exported--for us, imported--seafood. One percent. It needs to be doing 10 percent. It needs to be doing 10 percent, and my bill would help them do 10 percent. My bill would provide additional funding for additional seafood inspections on imported seafood, and we would be asking SIMP to go from 1 percent inspections of all imported seafood to 10 percent.
Now, there is no free lunch, Mr. President, and you don't get one now. My bill costs money. It will cost $36 million. In the grand scheme of our spending, that is not much, but $36 million is a lot of money. And I didn't want to come up here and just offer a bill that was a money suck; I wanted to come up here and say: Look, we have a problem. It will cost $36 million to solve it, and here is where the money is going to come from.
The money, the $36 million, will come from the money that has been appropriated--the extra billions of dollars that have been appropriated--to the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS, believe me, will never miss the $36 million. The IRS wastes that much money between bites of oatmeal at breakfast.
If we do this bill, people can enjoy their seafood, and they can appreciate the fact that it is safe.
So for that reason, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. 3533, which is at the desk--and S. 3533, as I just indicated, is the Seafood Import Monitoring Program Audits bill--and I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed, and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.
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Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, look, I understand Senator Wyden's point of view. I don't think he meant this, but I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that he didn't know about this bill and that all of my colleagues didn't know about this bill.
We have something called a hotline. And when we have a bill and we want to try to move it on the floor, we, through this hotline, notify well in advance every Senator: Hey, Kennedy is coming to the floor at this time, on this day, with his bill. If you object to it, you can come down and object.
That hotline was sent to Senator Wyden. It was sent to all the other 98 of my colleagues. It was sent to every single Senator, and we do hotlines every day.
So if he was surprised, I am sorry. But that is between him and his staff.
Point two, I appreciate Senator Wyden's point of view. He is a smart gentleman. He is smart enough to know this has nothing to do with wealthy tax cheats. This has to do with safe seafood for the American people.
The bill would have cost $36 million. It would come from the IRS. No Republican Senator voted for it. My Democratic colleagues gave the IRS $80 billion extra--$80 billion extra--to go out and audit the American people. This will take $36 million of it to make sure that they are still alive when the IRS audits them because they may not be eating dangerous shrimp full of antibiotics.
Does the IRS need all $80 billion? Of course not. How do I know that? Don't take Kennedy's word for it. Take the word of the gentleman who asked us to pass the bill: President Biden. He has already told us the IRS doesn't need the full $80 billion. He offered up $20 billion to us for this year's budget to spend on other things.
So the idea that the world is going to spin off its axis--and wealthy tax cheats and all of this other foolishness--is just not accurate. I say that with all respect to my colleague, Senator Wyden.
I will be back. For $36 million, we can protect the American people. I can promise you that the seafood board will spend that money better than the Internal Revenue Service. That is faint praise, but I can promise you that will happen.
My final point, I appreciate the opportunity to present this bill. Be careful what you eat, particularly if it is imported seafood. I am not kidding you. If you are eating seafood, given the statistics, you are probably eating foreign seafood, and this stuff can be dangerous. I mean it. Some of this product has enough antibiotics in it that you will grow an extra ear. And you don't want that.
The best way to be safe is to eat domestic seafood--good old American seafood. But if you don't, if you are going to eat foreign seafood, be very, very careful.
I will be back with a very commonsense approach to try to solve that problem, and I am sorry we couldn't do it today.
Thank you, Mr. President, for your time, and I thank Senator Wyden. And I wish both of you a Merry, Merry Christmas.
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