New Shutdown Record
Politicians broke their own prior record this week by failing to end the government shutdown, making it the longest in history at 36 days and edging the prior record during the first Trump Administration. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned that holiday travel may be severely disrupted unless a solution is reached soon, threatening a 10% reduction in flights at the 40 largest airports; and there’s talk that air traffic controllers and TSA employees will not receive back pay for any time they were out.
The shutdown is also affecting many other sectors of the economy and millions of people nationwide, like poor people needing food assistance, and citizens trying to do health care Zooms through Medicare, which has canceled them. Meanwhile, the blame game continues between legislators of the two parties.
Hemp Hooch: Whoops!
“Good intentions run amok” describes a situation involving hemp, which the 2018 Farm Bill sought to reintroduce as an industrial agricultural commodity, not to legalize an entirely new industry of highly intoxicating products. However, the bill’s ambiguous legislative language fueled the latter, which remains largely unregulated. In other words, there’s now a new, high-alcohol product that is widely available with little legal control.
WineAmerica is part of a coalition which has written to Congressional leadership asking that legislation be passed to immediately remove Hemp-derived THC products from the marketplace until a robust federal regulatory framework is established, as it already is for wine, beer, spirits, and other alcohol beverages.
On another front, WineAmerica has joined Wine Institute in asking the Trump Administration to do whatever is possible to reopen the Canadian wine market to US-produced wines, since Canada is our largest export market.