Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act of 2013
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. COHEN. I yield myself the balance of my time.
Mr. Chairman, we have had a good discussion on this bill. Indeed, it is ``Groundhog Day'' as we have had it so many times. We've just gone around and around.
It is amazing that this body, which I am so proud to serve in, has popularity ratings amongst the American public of less than 10 percent because of the ineffectiveness of the House to work with the Senate and get anything done. Yet here we are, trying to give this body more power over the safety and health--fiscal and physical--of the American public.
One of the gentlemen spoke and said, I don't know how tall something has to be--a dam. I don't know.
Of course he doesn't know. You leave it to the experts. We pass laws. We instruct the agencies to come up with reasonable rules and regulations because they know how to build dams and know how to have airplanes that you can get off of in case of a crash and save people's lives and how to have fire-retardant seats and deal with other safety issues. There are abundant safety issues for the American public.
This is a bad idea. It is an idea that will not create jobs. It will hurt the American public. It will hurt safety and possibly our financial safety as well because it could impede Dodd-Frank from going in to protect the American public from future financial doom like we almost saw in 2008 with derivatives here in this Congress.
So I would ask that we vote ``no,'' that we protect the American public, and that we respect the system that we have had for so many years for safety and health.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. COHEN. Mr. Chairman, this is a bad amendment to a bad bill, so it's doubly bad.
This would take almost anything that protects the air, the water, the public from carbon emissions away from the opportunity of the EPA to protect us. Many cities, such as Houston, Texas, and L.A. and other cities, have problems with smog. They have programs that they have to put a price on pollutants that cause urban smog, and these programs are part of the State-approved implementation plans through the EPA to protect the air. They are improving the air quality in Houston and Los Angeles, but under this amendment, if Texas or California ever needed to change these programs, they wouldn't be able to do so. Los Angeles has had enough smog, so has Houston and the rest of the country, and we have to be able to have laws that effectively protect our air.
Public health programs are important, and the amendment would risk the ability of EPA also to have its sanctions that they put into place. Right now, EPA, to ensure civil enforcement procedures, they change their penalties every 4 years to keep up with inflation so they're effective deterrents. This would stop this from happening, and eventually the deterrents would be less than necessary to stop bad actors from engaging in risky behavior that causes harm to the environment and harm to humans.
We just saw in January that Transocean agreed to pay $1 billion to resolve Federal Clean Water Act civil penalty claims for the 3-month-long oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the BP there. BP also has got the same risk. If we don't allow the penalties to be adjusted for inflation, they won't have an effect. The sanctions won't deter bad actors. We saw it in the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion, and we see it as it applies to the Clean Water Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and all those others.
The bottom line is this could have unintended consequences, but its intended consequence is to protect the oil industry from regulations and imperil the American public. This is a bad amendment to a bad bill, and I ask my colleagues to defeat it.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. COHEN. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I'll just reiterate that this is a bad amendment to a bad bill. It basically puts the interests of special industry--the gas and oil industry, particularly--above the American public's health, clean air, and the environment. If you want to have an Earth that we can give to the next generation that's in as good a shape so that their lungs can survive in it, you won't be for this type of regulation, this amendment, or for this bill.
I ask us to vote ``no,'' and I yield back the balance of my time.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. COHEN. Mr. Chairman, again, this is just another amendment in another area in what's totally a bad concept. The basic concept is that any rule or regulation would have to go through a passage in both the House and the Senate and Presidential approval to become effective. And it would have to happen in committees only on Tuesdays or Thursday, and within 15 days they would have to pass it. Basically, this is creating a Rube Goldberg type of legislative mechanism that would thwart the creation of regulations and rules that protect the American public. That's just plumb wrong.
What this does is tries to gut the EPA, and I'm shocked that my good friends on the other side of the aisle would try to gut the work of one of their great Presidents, Richard Nixon. He served in this House, served in the Senate, and 4 years as vice president. I think he almost eked out 5 years, he had some kind of ethically challenged problem when he was President, but he did create the EPA. He did some good environmental things. I think those things should be standards for the Republican Party. They should hold up the EPA and remember Richard Nixon as one of their party standard bearers, one of the men who served probably the longest time in a major capacity as President and Vice President and Senate leader. And his work on the House Un-American Activities Committee--we can't forget that in this House. To forget Richard Nixon and to minimize his work, I am just amazed, because that's one of the great heroes on the other side of the aisle, I believe.
But the EPA is important. It was good work that he gave us, and it shouldn't be gutted. And to make these rules have to go through passage in the House and Senate, we know the House and the Senate don't get along. They mentioned we got the loan bill through. That's the first thing we've kind of done since we did the Violence Against Women and kind of saved the storm victims of Superstorm Sandy. We really haven't got much done. Oh, I forget, a couple of post offices, we agreed on them. And maybe some coins for the Hall of Fame or something. But to get these major rules done, it wouldn't happen. And so we're jeopardizing the American public. I urge us to defeat this as a bad amendment to a bad bill. It is deleting the legacy of Richard Nixon.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. COHEN. Mr. Chairman, this is a microcosm of this 113th Congress; the macro has been the 40th attempt coming up to repeal ObamaCare. This is a microcosm to try to defeat ObamaCare through a little regulation. It seems like the preoccupation that the other side has with what is one of the most important social safety network provisions passed by this House in history, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and then the Affordable Care Act, is amazing. We've had 40 bills, and now this rule and regulation, to try to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act means your child can stay on your insurance unless they are 26 years of age. It means you can't have lifetime caps on your health insurance. It means you can't be denied coverage because of a preexisting condition. It means that being a woman doesn't classify you as having a preexisting condition. It says that certain care comes to you, like colonoscopies or mammograms, without a copay, and it means yearly annual checkups, which can detect disease early and save people's lives. It is a way to provide health care for at least 40 million people in this country who don't have health care.
And it has already been shown to drive down the cost of health care. For those States that have worked with us and that have exchanges, we have seen reductions in what was expected to be the cost of insurance from 25 to 30 to even 50 percent in different States. Health care costs are not rising at the rates that they were otherwise because of the fact that we passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
It's important that individuals get more community health centers, which come with this provision. Lots of people, particularly in my district, they don't live near hospitals and doctors. They need community health centers, and community health centers have been funded and created to give people access to health care otherwise denied.
We are the last industrialized country on the face of the Earth to provide health care for its people, the last industrialized country to do so. That is one of the shames that we have tried to cure with this bill.
And this provision, this amendment to this REINS Act, would deny people that health care coverage. It would say if you have a preexisting condition, too bad, you don't get insurance.
As President Obama said, the Affordable Care Act is insurance reform on steroids. Do you want to have the health insurance industry have total control without regulations, without controls, then you want to defeat it. But the American public doesn't want that. They want their health care costs to contained, and they don't want the insurance companies to have total control. They like the idea of their children having insurance up to the time they're 26, and to have preventive care come without copays, not have yearly caps on your insurance or lifetime caps on your insurance benefits that can be paid out.
So this is a sad state that we've spent so much time in this Congress trying to deny people health care and save their lives.
So this is a bad amendment. I would ask us to defeat it.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. COHEN. Mr. Chairman, what this shows is exactly what the situation is. You've got a majority in the House that's against the Affordable Care Act, and you've got a majority in the Senate that's for it.
To have any rules and regulations under it go into effect, the House and the Senate would both have to approve it, which means you could have one House, not both Houses, the way we work, it's a bicameral legislature and the House and the Senate have to work together and pass the bill to become law.
But one House, by not passing it, could kill it--one House veto. This Republican Congress could veto every single regulation under the Affordable Care Act.
And then preexisting conditions, no insurance. Lifetime caps, back in effect. Yearly caps, back in effect. Child's 23, nope, can't stay on dad and mom's policy anymore.
Get hurt, go broke. Too bad. That's just wrong.
And that's what this would do for any regulations. One House could veto and kill legislation. That's antithetical to the bicameral legislature.
That's just one of the many reasons why we should defeat this amendment, defeat the bill, and go on and try to pass a jobs bill, and kill sequester, and see that the National Institutes of Health, which is cut $1.6 billion by sequester, isn't cut.
That's our Department of Defense. They protect us from Alzheimer's, AIDS, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's. Those are the enemies. The National Institutes of Health is the Department of Defense, and we shouldn't be cutting $1.6 billion from them because we're all going to be victims.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. COHEN. Mr. Chairman, the amendment is twice as bad as the bill because it decreases by $50 million the threshold, which means more and more regulations would have to go through this cumbersome process and really stifle regulations and rules, and that's what this is about.
The Speaker said that the job of this Congress is not to pass legislation but to repeal legislation. That's what these bills are about. They're not to improve the lives of Americans by having more safety and more protection but, rather, to defeat proposals that may come from the EPA, which are to protect the air and the water and our Earth, as well as to protect other areas of safety, whether it's automobiles or airplanes or trains or trucks or whatever.
The fact is that this would make it almost impossible to pass a rule or a regulation, and it would allow one House the ability to kill a regulation. This is a House that doesn't have the expertise within it, which has been said by some of the Members in their saying they didn't know how big to build a dam or whatever. That's why we have government people who study and do research and promulgate rules and regulations--to protect us--and it's done in a nonpolitical environment. If you bring it to this environment, you're going to have lobbyists coming up, trying to kill things that affect their industries.
This is a yo-yo bill: you are on your own. That's what they're saying basically, that we don't want protections for consumers or protections for citizens. We want to have something laissez-faire: no rules and regulations. You're out there on your own.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. COHEN. Once again, this just takes it to another level. It's not just the rules, but then the rules of the rules.
Really what this bill is about is a messaging opportunity. We're supposed to be legislating. The reality is that we don't legislate in Congress; we message. One side says, We're for business. We're against regulations. We're against rules. We want to create enterprise by destroying rules and regulations. The other side, which is my side, says, We're for consumers. We're for safety. We're for protection. We're for health and clean water and clear air. We think that the government process works because it saves people; it saves their lives. We go back and forth.
This would effectively destroy the opportunity to have rules and regulations passed at all. It's not going to get through the Senate, so what it is is a messaging opportunity for us to fill up C-SPAN. It's unfortunate because we should be legislating about jobs and about the sequester. We ought to be talking about benefits that the government does provide, but right now sequestration is taking away important jobs in the Defense Department, moneys from the National Institutes of Health, which would protect people's lives in the long run with treatments and cures that we need, and the next generation will benefit greater than us; yet we're here talking about something that is not going to happen.
It is really unfortunate, because we should be legislating, and this bill just gets us into the weeds, gets us down into the regulations. It's like we're going to strangle the ``bureaucrats.'' But the bureaucrats are the experts who come up with the safety provisions that say your children's toys are going to be safe and your car is going to have brakes and work in the proper manner and your airplane is not going to fall out of the sky when it's not near the airport.
Those are important things to the American people, and if you don't have rules and regulations by experts that can be implemented, we're going to have a lot of accidents. That's why this is a very bad bill and a bad amendment and a bad use of the public's time.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source