At House Judiciary Hearing, CPR's Steinzor to Call for Repeal of Congressional Review Act
Tomorrow, CPR Member Scholar Rena Steinzor is scheduled to appear before the Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law of the House Judiciary Committee to testify at a hearing focused on the Congressional Review Act (CRA). The CRA is a controversial law that has been aggressively used this past year by the majority in Congress and the Trump administration to repeal 14 regulatory safeguards that would have protected consumers, workers, and our environment. In her testimony, Steinzor makes the case for repealing the CRA, arguing that it is an ineffective tool for overseeing the executive branch and its recent abuses have served only to further erode public esteem for Congress as a democratic institution.
Steinzor's testimony summarizes the damage that Congress has done to its own reputation through its misguided abuse of the CRA in the following stark terms:
I agree that the 115th Congress demonstrated rapid decision-making by killing 14 rules in a period of just a few weeks. But that rapid-fire spate of activity attracted more negative publicity than regulatory issues have achieved in many years. The story line of the coverage in most media outlets was that, at the behest of special interest lobbyists, especially …
Obama's Fall 2016 Versus Trump's Spring 2017 Unified Agendas
On July 20, 2017, the Trump administration announced that it was going to kill hundreds of rules considered by previous administrations to protect public health, worker and consumer safety, the environment, and working people navigating the financial services marketplace. The Trump Spring 2017 "regulatory agenda" was lengthy and complicated. To understand its full implications, you needed to compare it to the last regulatory agenda issued by the Obama administration in the fall of 2016. No one could achieve that detailed analysis within the news cycle spanning the president's announcement, although Matthew Shudtz, CPR's executive director, said accurately that "we are watching the American safety net unravel before our eyes."
We have now completed a comparison of the Obama and Trump agendas, as reflected in two charts that list the rules contained in:
- The last …
The newest dangerous proposal filtering through Congress is H.R. 2887, the "No Regulation Without Representation Act of 2017." Packaged as a prohibition on states regulating outside of their borders, the bill is a Trojan horse that usurps the states' role in the federal system and threatens their ability to protect their own citizens from harm. The House Committee on the Judiciary's Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law is taking up the bill in a hearing today, July 25, and Center for Progressive Reform Member Scholars have submitted a letter opposing the bill.
Poor drafting obscures impact
The bill itself is challenging to read. It is poorly drafted and hides its true impact behind generic terminology and rabbit-hole definitions. Here is a summary of the key language – after which a concrete example helps demonstrate its meaning.
The bill contains a prohibition: states may not …
Early this morning, the Trump administration released its Spring 2017 Regulatory Agenda, which outlines the regulatory and deregulatory actions the administration expects to take over the next 12 months. Because it is the first of the Trump administration, this document is particularly significant. By comparing it with the last Regulatory Agenda of the Obama administration, which was released in fall of 2016, we are able to see what pending regulatory actions the Trump administration has abandoned or delayed. Only a preliminary review is necessary to confirm the harm the outlined policies would do to the nation's hard-working families and communities and how they would exacerbate social inequality throughout our country.
Strikingly, the Spring 2017 Regulatory Agenda also offers the first concrete evidence of how the Trump administration intends to implement its harmful "one-in, two-out" executive order, which calls upon agencies to eliminate or weaken two existing …
Early in the Trump administration, news about delayed and "disappeared" rules emerged in several media outlets. Many of these delays were driven by a memo issued by Trump White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on January 20, 2017, which "froze" the implementation of rules until March 21, 2017, so that a representative of the administration could review them. Freezing rules for a limited amount of time is standard practice for newly inaugurated presidents. But the White House and agency administrators like the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) Scott Pruitt soon decided to move beyond the Priebus memo to impose further delays, some as long as a year or two, so that industry-friendly changes could be crafted without having to undergo the full rigor of a rulemaking process. Many of the targeted Obama-era rules were designed to protect public health, worker and consumer safety, and the environment …
Late last Thursday, the Small Business Administration's (SBA) Office of Advocacy announced that it was soliciting proposals for "small business research" projects. The solicitation – and particularly the category of topics that the SBA Office of Advocacy has selected for potential research projects – offers one of the first clues on how this obscure but powerful office is likely to operate under the Trump administration.
The SBA Office of Advocacy is a small and unusual office within the federal government that up until a few years ago largely flew under the radar. The singular event that brought them to broader attention among policymakers, the press, and members of the public interested in the U.S. regulatory system? Its sponsorship of a now-infamous piece of anti-safeguards propaganda that was produced in response to a solicitation of small business research just like the one from last Thursday.
In 2010, the …
Originally published by the George Washington Law Review
How should a court assessing a regulatory takings claim define the "property" allegedly taken to assess the degree of the economic impact the regulation has on it? That question has plagued the Supreme Court for nearly a century, with different and conflicting answers emerging, sometimes in relatively rapid succession. In Murr v. Wisconsin,1 the Court has provided its most comprehensive answer to the so-called "denominator" question so far, although even the analytical framework the Court provides leaves ample room for refinement in future cases.
Not until 1922 did the Supreme Court clearly establish that the Fifth Amendment's prohibition on the taking of property without just compensation (which applies to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment) applies to regulations as well as physical intrusions and compelled transfers of title. The case in which it did so provided its …
As appalling as the first five months of the Trump presidency have been to those of us who care about public policy and good government, we can't claim to be surprised. As Hillary Clinton memorably explained to historians last summer in Philadelphia, "There is no other Donald Trump. This is it."
But what has been a surprise is how bad this Congress has been at legislating. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are hardly newbies to the Washington scene or the political process. In particular, McConnell is the quintessential political insider: He's not much of a spokesman and is not known as an "ideas guy." But he knows the rules of the Senate, has built relationships with his Republican colleagues, knows how to wield power, and because he feels no need to be popular outside of Kentucky, he is willing to do things that are unpopular …
Earlier this week, Axios and Greenwire ($) reported that international oil behemoth BP is bringing on a new lobbyist to work on "regulatory reform advocacy related to Federal energy and environmental rules," as described in the required lobbying disclosure statement. That in itself is hardly news. What makes this story remarkable is who the lobbyist is, or in this case, was. Nathan Frey, who appears to be the only partner with the lobbying firm Regulatory Strategies and Solutions Group, used to be on the staff at the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA).
Regular readers of this blog know by now that OIRA plays a powerful role in the regulatory system. A series of executive orders stretching back to the Reagan administration requires executive branch agencies to submit their biggest and most important rules to OIRA for centralized review. Agencies cannot proceed with proposing or …
Today, Neomi Rao is likely to take one step closer to becoming the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) – that is, the Trump administration's "regulatory czar" – with the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee expected to favorably report her nomination to the Senate floor for a final confirmation vote.
As detailed in an April 2017 CPR report on her nomination, Rao would arrive at her new position with little substantive expertise related to OIRA's work. (Evidently, her demonstrated commitment to the prevailing conservative anti-regulatory orthodoxy was the only real qualification that was needed.) But Rao still has some time to brush up on the big issues she will face as OIRA Administrator, and at the top her reading list should be The Twin Demons of the Trump-Bannon Assault on Democracy, a new report out today from Center for Progressive Reform …
