Unfortunately, we live in a world of professional paid advocacy. There is a nonprofit group on both sides of just about every issue today. One could say that this is the problem with democracy, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. What really bugs me about some of these organizations is that they are nothing more than a way for some people to create good paying jobs for themselves.
Last week the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund (R-CALF) decided to take another swipe at the Beef Checkoff. The program has been conducting business for 32 years now and has been a good investment for U.S. cattle producers. But, as with any mandatory collection program, there will be dissenters and R-CALF has spent its existence being a dissenter to the Beef Checkoff.
R-CALF challenged the Montana Beef Council (MBC) in Montana District Court and won their case on First Amendment grounds, calling the checkoff compelled speech that they didn’t agree with. This same case was taken all the way to the Supreme Court on free speech grounds many years ago. The Beef Checkoff won the case, claiming it was “government speech” which benefited society.
But on the state level it’s a little different. Each beef council is set up differently and R-CALF found a hole that they could exploit. The MBC is a private nonprofit organization. They have no governmental oversight, auditing funds, or projects. The Cattlemen’s Beef Board (CBB) does an annual review of each state beef council, but the state of Montana doesn’t have any oversight. Therefore, the court determined that the MBC was funding private speech, not government speech that some Montanans disagreed with.
R-CALF found the venue and a judge who is favorable, so they succeeded, in theory. Then it was appealed to the Ninth District Circuit Court of Appeals, which supported the lower court. Now, R-CALF and company has found 13 state beef councils that are structured like MBC and filed suit. They plan to pursue these other beef councils in their already-determined-friendly venue. They got one person for each state to petition the courts to file an injunction on their respective beef council.
The names of the petitioners should be nothing new, and their attorneys—Rossbach Law, a Missoula law firm that handled the MBC case; Public Justice, the D.C. firm that is directly connected to the Humane Society of the U.S.; and good old Dudley Butler and his firm, head of the Grain Inspection Packers and Stockyards Administration during the Obama administration—tried to rewrite the Packers and Stockyards Act. And of course, there’s R-CALF’s Bill Bullard, who has been pursuing the CBB and NCBA like a rabid dog. Nothing new here; just a different strategy. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that lawyers don’t like to lose. Their egos won’t allow it. And after 32 years of checkoff battles, the same advocates are still at it. One would think they would get tired of it.
Edit (8/21/2018, 3:03 pm MT): A previous version listed Dudley Butler as the head of the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service. This was incorrect. Butler was the head of the Grain Inspection Packers and Stockyards Administration.
Ironically, the MBC still must collect assessments and forward the money to the CBB, so they haven’t harmed the NCBA at all. But MBC can’t spend any funds on local projects unless they have their producers sign off. Normally that would be around $850,000 they could spend in Montana, but they have less than $200,000 in producer-consented dollars for in-state promotions.
Bullard said in a press release, “The checkoff program has weakened the U.S. cattle industry by helping importers capture greater share of our domestic market, and now the courts have found that USDA facilitated this by violating the constitutional rights of cattle producers. It is imperative that we proceed to protect the constitutional rights of cattle producers in these other states by stopping USDA from forcing them to fund private speech that undermines their financial and economic interests.”
In my view there may be a handful of producers being harmed over the checkoff. In my travels I never hear anyone complain about it, and in our own surveys 75 percent of WLJ readers support the program.
Now we’re faced with fixing the structure of the state beef councils and it appears that USDA is contemplating expanding their oversight efforts to the states, so they will be qualified to render government speech in their promotional efforts.
It’s a shame that a handful of folks want to destroy the beef industry’s marketing program while so many cattlemen are benefitting from it. And I don’t get the idea of using HSUS attorneys to fund and fight this episode. To me, it’s almost treasonous. — PETE CROW





