On Sunday afternoon, Ben Cline posted about a listening session with the Virginia Farm Bureau. He said he would "hear directly from the farmers who feed and fuel our Commonwealth," and committed to giving Virginia's farmers "support, resources, and certainty."

Ninety minutes later, the Virginia Cattlemen's Association posted something else.

What the cattlemen said

The VCA is headquartered in Daleville — about a ten-minute drive from Cline's home, and inside the 6th District he represents.

At 3:21 p.m., it posted a statement describing widespread industry concern about the administration's plan to flood the market with imported ground beef. The association called it "bad policy that will do more to hurt cattle producers than help consumers."

Its president, Bill McDonald, spelled out why. The policy, he said, "undermines the market from encouraging cattle producers to retain more females to grow the USA herd, which in the long run will make for an affordable and secure national food supply."

That's the technical version. The plain version: when the government dumps cheap foreign beef into the market, ranchers stop holding back heifers to build their herds — and the American cattle supply shrinks, which makes beef more expensive later, not less.

The association urged people to contact their elected officials.

Cline is their elected official. His post about listening never mentioned it.

What Trump actually did

On August 21, 2026, Trump announced he was waiving the tariff on imported ground beef that normally kicks in once foreign shipments pass a set limit. That clears the way for up to 300,000 metric tons of imported ground beef over 90 days, at a promised 25% below market price.

Cattle futures dropped that same morning.

So American cattle producers now face a market being deliberately undercut by their own government — while the steel and equipment tariffs that drove up the cost of running a farm are still in place.

Cline told Virginians they had it coming

Cline has been asked about the tariffs before. He was clear.

As the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect, he told Charlottesville's WVIR that Virginians shouldn't complain: "These are all things that they voted for in November." He said the tariffs were how Trump would "attack inflation."

They did not attack inflation. They raised costs on the farms he now says he is listening to.

And he voted to take away Congress's say

This is the part that goes beyond a photo op.

There is a law — the National Emergencies Act — that lets any member of Congress force a vote to end a national emergency a president has declared. Trump used emergency powers to impose the tariffs on February 1, 2025, which started that clock.

House Republicans turned the clock off. They buried a provision inside H. Res. 211, the rule for a government funding bill, saying that each remaining day of that session of Congress "shall not constitute a calendar day" for the purpose of ending that emergency. No days, no clock, no forced vote.

On March 11, 2025, the House adopted that rule 216–214. Ben Cline voted aye. He also voted aye on the procedural motion that cut off debate on it minutes earlier.

We wrote about the Minnesota Republican who managed that rule on the floor. Cline wasn't the manager. He was one of the 216 votes that made it work.

So when farmers in the Shenandoah Valley asked Congress to do something about tariffs, the answer was that their congressman had already voted to make sure Congress couldn't.

Not a Virginia problem — a Republican one

The same squeeze is hitting farm country everywhere Republicans hold a seat and won't cross the president. Ohio farmers watched their senator vote three separate times, over three days in October 2025, to keep the tariffs that drove up their input costs. Indiana growers lost $607 million in exports. Michigan soybean farmers lost the Chinese market outright.

Meanwhile, in Cline's district, 31,685 households — about 10% of all households in VA-06 — rely on SNAP, according to USDA data. Cheaper beef at the register was the pitch. It isn't reaching them, and it's costing the people who raise the cattle.

What the record shows

Ben Cline posted about listening to Virginia farmers on Sunday afternoon. Ninety minutes later, the cattlemen's association based ten minutes from his house called the administration's 300,000-metric-ton beef import plan "bad policy that will do more to hurt cattle producers than help consumers." Cline told Virginians the tariffs squeezing those same farms were "things that they voted for," and on March 11, 2025 he voted for the rule that declared days would stop counting so the House could not vote to end the tariff emergency for the rest of that session.

Source

Ben Cline pretends to listen to farmers, as Valley beef industry struggles to keep up — Chris Graham, Augusta Free Press, August 23, 2026. Photo via Augusta Free Press.