Trump wants cheaper beef. Republicans in key races warn his plan goes too far

Three hundred thousand metric tons of foreign ground beef. That's the number that ought to stop people in their tracks, because it tells you Washington's answer to expensive burgers is to lean on Brazilian and Australian cattle rather than fix what's actually driving prices at home. Tom Cotton and Tim Sheehy aren't rebelling against the president for sport. Sheehy runs cattle in Montana. He knows the difference between a supply problem and a policy shortcut, and this plan is the second thing dressed up as the first.

American cattle herds are at their smallest size in seventy years. Drought, feed costs, and years of ranchers getting squeezed by packers have done that, not a lack of imported meat. Flooding the market with cheap foreign beef might knock a few cents off the price of a pound of ground chuck at the grocery store, but it does that by handing the win to producers overseas while American ranchers eat the margin hit. That's not a fix. That's a subsidy for somebody else's cattle industry, paid for by ours.

There's also a political reality here that's hard to ignore. Cotton and Sheehy are not exactly known for freelancing against this president. When they're the ones raising the alarm, in an election cycle where rural voters are paying close attention, that's a signal worth taking seriously rather than waving off as disloyalty. Cheap beef sounds good on a grocery receipt. It sounds a lot worse if it's American ranchers who end up footing the bill for somebody else's price relief.

We want lower prices too. Everyone does. But the fastest fix isn't always the right one, and there's something off about an America First administration reaching for imports before it's done everything possible to rebuild the domestic herd and get packers to stop squeezing ranchers on price. Cotton and Sheehy are asking the administration to slow down and think about who actually pays for this. That's not disloyalty. That's the job.