HURON — Though some want to portray politics, especially the work of politicians in Washington, as adversarial, Sen. Mike Rounds shared that the reality is that more often people are working together than working against one another while visiting at the South Dakota State Fair on Friday.

He addressed a recent event in Spearfish that saw a group of vocal far-right voters get heated in conversation.

“Sometimes, the only way to address that type of hot conversation is to let everybody else see the fallacy of the individuals trying to make the point,” Rounds observed. “We want to respect the fact that they’re there to make a point, and that’s fine, but it also helps to have other people hear them and to hear that maybe they might not be right.”

He continued, “That continues even now. We continue to get calls even now from people saying ‘I’m so embarrassed for the tone they used’ and I don’t think people need to be embarrassed. Some got to speak their point, and it’s allowed for many to say that’s not our party.”

When discussing how Democrats and Republicans can work together on the national stage and work together individually, he had very personal reflections to draw from.

“When I lost my wife, I had members from both parties call me with condolences. The President called; the Vice-President called,” Rounds recalls. “Similarly, I had a Democratic colleague suffer a stroke and I called him right away. We’re friends. We may have different tactics to get the America we want, but we’re not enemies. We are friends.”

Rounds spoke to South Dakota-related efforts focused in the farm bill regarding meat packing and labeling.

“With only four major companies processing beef in the United States, we think there are some problems,” Rounds stated. He then explained that putting a focused bill on the meat packing industry onto the floor could be problematic for multiple reasons, but adding it to the farm bill allows for it to be more likely to pass. “The packers will never want someone investigating them, so you have to put it as part of a larger bill, like the farm bill.”

With mandatory country of origin labeling (mCOOL), proper wording could allow for the United States to work around issues that previously had been removed from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by the World Trade Organization.

“We are not making it a law that mCOOL will automatically take effect,” Rounds explained. “We are saying that the next time we go to negotiate one of these trade agreements that it is required to include mCOOL. We’ve never done that before. If mCOOL is in the trade agreement, the WTO can’t remove it.”

Rounds was quick to compliment his colleagues from the state for pushing items like those two onto the farm bill.

“Having Dusty (Johnson) on the Ag committee on the House side and John (Thune) on the Senate committee is big for South Dakota, for sure,” Rounds encouraged.

From his own committee work, Rounds reported that he is very active with veteran’s health, hoping to give South Dakota veterans more options to receive medical care, whether that’s at a VA facility or a local clinic that can be certified through the VA.

“The VA doesn’t like it because that means money going out from the VA,” said Rounds. “For veterans, though, it makes more sense because they can get service close to home.”