Reggulation: As President Obama continues his bizarre last-minute regulatory siege without letup, Donald Trump has made it clear he'll undo most of the unneeded rules once he's in office. And Congress hopes to make it very easy for him to do.
As he heads for the exits, Obama is engaged in a frenzy of regulation, intended to hamstring American businesses and reward green groups and unions. But while the pace has picked up recently, it's really nothing new.
As Paul Bedard of the Washington Examiner has noted, Obama's "lame duck administration poured on thousands more new regulations in 2016 at a a rate of 18 for every new law passed," citing a new study by Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Yes, Congress passes many of the laws that make these regulations possible. In 2016, Congress passed 211 laws, which is pretty impressive given that the House was only in session for about 111 days.
Even so, Obama's bureaucracy in 2016 laid on another 3,852 new federal regulations, without any input from Congress, adding billions of dollars of cost to U.S. businesses and consumers. At year-end, the Federal Register totaled 97,110 pages — up from 80,260 just last year. It's a massive tidal wave of new regulation and, economists agree, a major reason why the economy continues to struggle.
The upshot of all this is that the last-minute regulations passed just since November have added an estimated $44.1 billion in costs to the economy, according to an estimate by the American Action Forum.
To remedy this, the House on Wednesday passed the Midnight Rules Relief Act for the second time since November, in the hopes of prodding the Senate to do the same. The bill, introduced by California Rep. Darrell Issa, amends the earlier Congressional Review Act, which is intended to slow the number of unnecessary "midnight regulations" put in place by departing p**********l administrations. The Midnight Rules Relief Act gives Congress the ability to overturn large numbers of rules en masse, rather than one by one. It will be a powerful tool.
It passed in the House by 238-184, mostly along party lines.
But the House isn't finished. It has another major deregulatory action teed up: The Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act. That proposed law would require federal bureaucracies to submit major rules — those having an annual economic impact of $100 million or more — to Congress for review and an up-or-down v**e.
Taken together, these new laws would be a formidable one-two punch against the ever-growing power of the White House and the bureaucracy to make laws without any "small-D" democratic input whatsoever. It would go a long way toward clipping the wings of the increasingly powerful, unelected administrative state that silently governs all our lives and limits our freedoms — to our great detriment.
We hope once Trump takes office on Jan. 20, he and Congress will join to put an end to this regulatory craziness. Congress should give him the tools by passing both these bills and making them law.
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/putting-an-end-to-obamas-economy-destroying-regulatory-siege/