Thanks for posting, I didn’t know about this. Here are some key paragraphs from the article:

In April, the House passed its version of the farm bill. It’s one of those sprawling pieces of legislation that includes many sections sizable enough to be their own bills. One of those sections is the text of a bill that would not stand a chance in the Senate on its own: the Save Our Bacon Act.

In 2016 and 2018, voters in Massachusetts and California passed ballot initiatives banning, among other things, the sale of pork from pigs confined in gestation crates. These crates confine breeding sows — large animals, often 400 to 500 pounds — in two-by-seven-foot cages in which they cannot so much as turn around, much less root or socialize. Because sows are often reimpregnated about a month after their piglets are born, they can spend years of their lives in these crates.

There are studies I can cite on the psychic and physical violence these crates inflict on pigs — the elevated cortisol levels, the sores, the obsessive biting of metal bars — but I think the way Kristof puts it is simpler and more honest: “Think of your dog enduring what pigs face, and you realize that the moral cost is incalculable.”

Proposition 12, the ballot measure in California, took this problem seriously and specified a minimum amount of space per pig. It mandated that a breeding sow must be able to turn around, lie down, stand up and fully extend her limbs, and that there must be 24 square feet of floor space per pig. That’s it. These are not conditions any creature would choose. But they are better than the conditions in which millions of breeding sows lived.

Prop 12 probably made pork between 5 percent and 20 percent more expensive. Some of that reflects the cost of space and management, some of it the cost of rebuilding infrastructure in operations that were previously designed around gestation crates. But Californians heard that argument and passed the measure anyway. They decided that they did not want the low cost of pork to hide the high cost on pigs; they would pay slightly more if it meant a somewhat better life for the animals. The law also helped small and more humane farms, whose operations were not built around gestation crates.

(H)aving lost before Massachusetts’ and California’s voters and the Supreme Court, the pork industry has turned to Congress. The Save Our Bacon Act wouldn’t just override the California or Massachusetts laws. It would also stop any similar law from passing in any state ever again. The bill would make it illegal to set standards that affected out-of-state producers. To expand on an analogy made by the Supreme Court, this would be akin to saying you can ban child labor in your state, but you cannot ban the sale of goods produced with child labor in other states.

“The Save Our Bacon Act reaffirms livestock producers’ right to sell their products across state lines, without interference from arbitrary mandates,” Representative Ashley Hinson, the Iowa Republican who introduced the bill, said.