Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act of 2013

Floor Speech

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Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Chairman, I rise today to oppose this misguided piece of legislation, which would erect new obstacles and red tape to protecting American lives.

At the outset, let me just reiterate what Mr. Cohen said earlier in his opening remarks, which is that Congress already has the power to disapprove any rule through the Congressional Review Act, through the appropriations process, and through other authorizing legislation.

H.R. 367, let's face it, is essentially an attempt to impose a procedural chokehold on protecting American citizens. I want to talk about one of those proposed rules, which is now pending at OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is a rule to prevent the continuing litany of workplace fire and explosions from combustible dust.

Unfortunately, the Rules Committee didn't see fit to allow an amendment offered by Representative George Miller to exclude that rule from the underlying bill. It has been abundantly clear for a decade that Federal regulatory action is needed to prevent combustible dust explosions and fires.

In 2003, the Chemical Safety Board found that protections to stop these explosions were grossly inadequate. The Board identified hundreds of other combustible dust fires and explosions, causing at least 119 fatalities and 715 injuries over the last 15 years.

The investigators themselves are not alone in demanding action. Tammy Miser of Kentucky testified before Congress recently about how her brother Shawn was killed in a metal dust fire at an aluminum wheel plant in Huntington, Indiana, in 2003. She told us how he was left lying on a smoldering floor after the explosion while aluminum dust burned through his flesh and muscle tissue. And each breath caused his internal organs to be burned even more.

Shawn wasn't the first to die at work this way, and he hasn't been the last. It has been more than 5 years since the Imperial Sugar explosion in Georgia, an explosion that killed 14 workers. It caused hundreds of millions of dollars in damage because an unchecked accumulation of sugar dust ignited and caused a chain of explosions, leveling the plant.

These workplace explosions have not stopped. There have been 49 major combustible dust fires or explosions that have killed 18 and injured 131 workers since Imperial Sugar.

More recently, five workers were killed in three separate events at a factory north of Nashville because an iron powder processing plant failed to abate repeated dust hazards. Each of the five left behind a wife and child; one had four children under 11, another became a grandfather the day before he was killed.

Widows have called on their government to protect them, and that's where OSHA comes in. In 2009, OSHA finally started work on a rule to reduce the risk of these explosions. There will be small business panels, risk assessments, public hearings, and plenty of opportunities for comments.

Despite the clear need to move forward, this bill would give special interests a new way to block needed protections, and they are already lining up to kill a rule they dislike.

The sad truth is that the underlying bill is nothing more than an effort to put the powerful above the lives and limbs of working families and their widows.

I urge my colleagues to vote down this bill.

If I have another few seconds, I just want to say we are now hours away from a 5-week recess. 640,000 DOD civilian employees are looking at Congress, asking why they should be furloughed for the next 8 weeks, losing 20 percent of their pay, some of whom are doing critical work for our national security, and yet not once in the over 200 days since this Congress was sworn in, has the governing majority brought a bill to this floor to turn off sequester and make sure that these people who are doing critical work for our national security can do their job. That's what we should be focused on. We should cancel the recess, turn off sequester, and end the endless debate about bills that are headed nowhere.

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