Searching for and Cutting Regulations That Are Unnecessarily Burdensome Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. PETERS. I thank the gentleman for yielding.

Mr. Chairman, the Harvard Business School's United States Competitiveness Project has outlined eight actions it recommends that Congress take to make America the most economically competitive place in the world to do business, not just to increase corporate profits, but to increase wages for working people across America.

Among those eight steps, which include immigration reform, responsible Federal budgeting, tax reform, and investing in infrastructure and research, is simplifying Federal regulation. The idea is not to lower standards but to regulate more intelligently, keeping in mind costs and benefits, and focusing on outcomes rather than compliance methods.

I am in lockstep agreement with the Harvard Business School and with House Republican leadership and with many of my Democratic colleagues on the objective of simplifying and streamlining Federal regulation. But what frustrates me today is that the House Republican leadership's so-called SCRUB Act has no chance of passage, and they know it. Because it requires costs to be arbitrarily cut, with no policy goal, and makes it hard to do even good rulemaking in the future, it has virtually no support among Democrats, including, most notably, the President of the United States, who would have to sign the bill for it to become law.

If we want to be serious about regulatory reform, we should bring up a bill that has bipartisan support, will pass this Chamber, and has a chance at the President's approval as well.

The amendment that will be offered later by the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Murphy), my colleague, that I cosponsored, is based on the Regulatory Improvement Act of 2015. The bill is strongly bipartisan, counting new Democrats, moderate Republicans, and even Freedom Caucus members among its cosponsors.

It would empower, like the SCRUB Act, an independent, bipartisan commission to sift through the regulatory accumulation of the past decades to recommend changes and eliminations and to present those recommendations to Congress for an up-or-down vote.

Now, we have heard the Republican leadership say that Congress, in 2016, will be about drawing contrasts. Apparently, that means that, rather than seeking to work together in areas on which we agree, we will have a series of these message bills, like the SCRUB Act, that are more about making a political point than making policy. So we will talk about the SCRUB Act instead of passing the Regulatory Improvement Act; and therefore, we will not provide the economy and our workers the regulatory relief that we all want to provide them and we agreed that they need. And that, drawing contrasts to win elections instead of working on solutions for our constituents in areas in which Republicans and Democrats agree, is what people hate about Congress.

I urge my colleagues to support the bipartisan approach.

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