Unfunded Mandates Information and Transparency Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Chairman, I thank my good friend from Maryland for
yielding me this time.

Mr. Chairman, this bill has a lot of chutzpah even for a probusiness
majority. The point of the review and comment regulatory process is to
hear from everybody, to pull everybody into the process.

I have experienced how this process worked when I chaired the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission. In order to make sure I heard from
everyone, I took a process which issued guidelines, which did not come
under the Administrative Procedure Act, and put it under the
Administrative Procedure Act to make sure I heard from everyone.

In a real sense, I knew, I thought I knew what the public wanted
because I was a civil rights lawyer. I was particularly interested in
whether the reforms I was instituting would work in practice. So I was
more interested, in a real sense, in what the business community said.

I must tell you, Mr. Chairman, in these processes, the business
community, small and large, dwarfs the public in the amount of comment
that agencies receive.

This bill breaks a cardinal rule by excluding, of all people, the
public, while industry gets an advance look at a bill. Understand, it
is the industry that is being regulated, industry that has the high-
cost lobbyists, the high-cost lawyers that the public does not have.

So what is the point here, Mr. Chairman? It is clear. The point is to
get industry in on writing the bill itself and writing it at that stage
before the public even gets to know what the bill is. This is not a
tilt in favor of the objects of regulations; it is a slide in their
favor.

If the point is the usual bipartisan point, to help small
businesses--which, by the way, is already a stakeholder--along with
other businesses, why pit small businesses against small children and
small mortgage holders and small IT users?

Another extraordinary thing I see in this bill is that the court-
hating majority, at least in this bill, falls in love with the
judiciary by inviting litigation before the rule is final. The courts
will just love that. On top of everything else, this bill adds $18
million over 10 years to agency spending?

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Ms. NORTON. $18 million that this majority certainly will not
appropriate.

Small business always have been a bipartisan concern. We have many
more of them in our districts than we have large businesses. Small
businesses are not who will come to ``consult.'' It is the global
multinationals who are applauding this bill as we speak.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

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