Midnight Rules Relief Act

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. KILEY. Mr. Speaker, to my friend from Maryland, I would say that one of the nice things about this bill that we are considering is that it allows us--if there are any good Biden-era regulations out there, they can stay--to simply choose to disapprove of the bad ones, of which there are quite a few.

Then to this idea that we can't disapprove of regulations as a batch because we need to have a debate over each and every one in this rarified Chamber, I would point out that there was no debate at all in this Chamber for any of those regulations when they were imposed by the agencies. We had no role whatsoever. This act allows us to reclaim our legislative authority and our role in the policymaking process going forward.

Mr. Speaker, I am proud to support the Midnight Rules Relief Act because President Joe Biden went on a regulation binge in his last few months in office. From August 1 of last year through the end of his Presidency, there were 1,524 new regulations issued. This bill today will allow us to press the reset button and to have a more considered process for policymaking when it comes to all of these different areas affected.

There are three main reasons I think that this is a good idea. The first has to do with the nature of regulations themselves, the death by a million cuts that is being felt by every industry and every sector throughout our country. When it comes to energy projects to make our country energy independent, when it comes to transportation projects to make our roads safer and to alleviate traffic, when it comes to forest management projects, when it comes to just about anything you can think of, and when it comes to being a small business owner, the sheer weight of regulation after regulation is making it unduly difficult to build, grow, expand, empower people, hire, and move us toward the prosperity that this country is truly capable of.

Secondly, there is a question of democratic legitimacy. When you have a President who has just been rejected by voters, or in this case at least he has chosen not to run again and his Vice President did not succeed in getting elected, to then issue over 1,500 regulations is a way of trying to lock in unpopular policies.

What this bill does, again, is it only affects new regulations in the last year of one's Presidency. It prevents this sort of undemocratic hangover effect, where new regulations are hastily thrown together in order to block the change that people have voted for.

Finally, I point out that there is an opportunity for Congress to reclaim its legislative authority. We have seen the administrative state and the bureaucracies that issued the sort of regulations we are talking about that have continued to grow and grow and affect American life in new ways and more intrusive ways every single year. We have had a few changes that have allowed us to reverse this decades-long trajectory. Of course, there is the election of President Trump and his commitment to rolling back regulations. There is also the decision from the Supreme Court revisiting the Chevron doctrine.

This legislation adds to that mix. It gives us the ability to say that we are not going to continue to outsource all of our lawmaking authority to administrative agencies. Rather, when it comes to the core of making policy that will affect the lives of Americans, we ought to be very mindful of giving that away and allowing bureaucrats to do the job that the American people have entrusted to us.

When we do that, we can reclaim the idea of self-government, that policy is made by those who truly represent the people.

Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague from Arizona for proposing this legislation. I look forward to seeing it pass, and I look forward from there on out to the newly empowered Congress being able to consider the merits of those regulations and decide on much better policies moving forward.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source