Julie Kelly uses a National Review column to question congressional priorities.
As I flipped between C-SPAN2 and cable news on the night of July 7, it became clear there are no grown-ups in charge in Washington.
One channel showed horrifying images of a warlike scene in Dallas, with reports of sniper fire and several police officers down. The other channel showed our nation’s top leaders hoisting oversized photos of candy and soup cans, talking about food labels.
The contrast couldn’t have been any starker: an American city again under siege while senators debated whether a bag of potato chips should have a meaningless GMO label. Didn’t anyone know what was going on? Couldn’t someone have said: We look like complete imbeciles right now. Let’s take down the pictures of smiling moms grocery-shopping and call it a night.
It was a shameful spectacle. The Senate was voting on a bill that forces food companies to furnish a mandatory GMO label on its products. The bill is the result of years of aggressive lobbying by special interests, particularly in the organic industry, because the labels will help sell non-GMO organic food by demonizing genetic engineering (a technology declared safe by every major scientific organization around the world, including the National Academies of Science in a lengthy assessment released last May).
