Opinion

Congress can stop Obama’s out-of-control regulators

Elizabeth Letchworth Former U.S. Senate Secretary
Font Size:

According to a George Washington University study, the Obama administration issued 16,200 regulations in 2009. In comparison, just 28,400 regulations were issued in the period from April 1996 through December 2000. If this doesn’t get your jaw dropping, a 57% increase in the staffing and the federal funds devoted to developing and enforcing federal regulations should have you shaking your head. Also, in order to get an accurate picture of regulators run amok, you need to add to these 16,200 regulations the thousands of regulations included in the financial reform bill, the food safety bill and the health care bill, all passed in 2010. Finally, a full picture of regulators on steroids can be plainly seen if you also add the final weeks in December 2010, when Obama’s regulators continued to issue rules and vote on regulations that had been defeated or vigorously opposed in Congress.

Over the Christmas weekend, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services issued a new regulation that provides payments to doctors who conduct end-of-life counseling with their patients, the re-birth of the so-called “death panels.” Readers may remember that these provisions were taken out of the Obamacare bill during the negotiations with Congress in the early spring of 2010. Members of Congress objected because many believed end-of-life care should be left to families and not forced on us by our federal government. The president agreed to drop the “death panels” and thus the legislative language was removed before passage of the bill. When President Obama skirted the Senate confirmation process by recess-appointing the head of CMS in July 2010, senators cried foul again and said the appointee, Administrator Donald Berwick, would resurrect death panels.

During Christmas week, on Dec. 21, 2010, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) gave itself the power to establish rules regulating Internet service providers. The federal government will now safeguard our use of the Internet, protecting us from Internet providers that have never shown any indication that they will restrict our Internet access. This regulation has been dubbed “net neutrality.”

These are just two of the latest moves by Obama’s regulators and need to be added to the massive list of other rules and regulations that are being written on a weekly basis by our federal agencies.

Congress can and should start using the Congressional Review Act to stop this overreach by the Obama administration and wean regulators off the steroids they seem to be on. Using the Congressional Review Act will do just that. The CRA was designed back in 1996 to combat Clinton administration regulators, after they created a number of expensive regulations dealing with workplace ergonomics. The business community went nuts over the regulations, which prompted Congress to create a process by which regulations can be made null and void, even after they are already in place.

The Congressional Review Act works like this. First, all agencies must report to Congress a concise statement describing the rule and the effective date of the new regulation. Members of both chambers of Congress have 60 days to introduce a joint resolution disapproving of the rule. The joint resolution is then sent to the appropriate committee, where timetables for debate and consideration take over. Full Senate debate is required at a certain point and can’t be blocked or ignored by the Senate majority leader. Debate in the Senate is limited to 10 hours, with no ability to alter the text. A simple majority vote is all that is required to pass the disapproval resolution in both the House and Senate. If both chambers pass it, the joint resolution is sent to the president for his approval or veto. This is where the rubber meets the road!

President Obama promised to remove “death panels” from Obamacare when it was being debated in Congress. Will the president keep his promise and sign the disapproval resolution, thereby once again making “death panels” a thing of the past? Or will POTUS veto the resolution, and prove to the American people that his word or bond means nothing when negotiating with Congress?

We should remember the few rules and timetables involved in producing a resolution to disapprove of an agency regulation under the Congressional Review Act, because I have the feeling that the use of the Congressional Review Act will become commonplace in the 112th Congress. Stay tuned.

Elizabeth B. Letchworth is a retired, elected United States Senate Secretary for the Majority and Minority. Currently she is a senior legislative adviser for Covington & Burling, LLC and is the founder of GradeGov.com.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel