Real Estate Jobs and Investment Act of 2011

Thank you, Mr. Speaker.

We're all glad to be back in the capital city to talk about the regulations that are drowning our country, and we have got some legislation that's going to try to do something about that.

I see that some of my colleagues are here to join me in talking about these things. I've been on the floor of this House now for the last 18 months explaining to people how these regulations are killing jobs in this country. And really what it cuts down to what we need to turn this country around, we don't need big stimulus spending. That didn't work. We tried that. We don't need the government to tell us how to run our business. We need the people to be able to run their business with the government getting out of the way.

And so we have today several bills that we think are going to be very important to tell us just exactly how we can make sense out of this overwhelming amount of regulations.

Thousands of regulations just this year have been proposed, many of which will kill hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country.

I have two of my colleagues that are here. I will first recognize my friend from Kentucky--I think he has somewhere to go--to tell us a little bit about a solution that he has proposed.

Let me point out that the $1.75 trillion is more than the entire income tax for that year that was collected by this country. So, when you talk about a burden, it's more than the entire tax burden of our Nation for that year.

I thank the gentleman from Kentucky for the work you've done on the REINS Act.

This is a good bill. This needs to be passed by Congress. I hope that our colleagues over on the Senate sides, when they grab ahold of this, get excited about it and realize that regulations impose more burdens on the American people than this Congress does. In many instances, they come to us and say--Why did you pass this law that puts this burden on us?--when the real issue is they don't understand that it was done by regulations, by people who were not elected, unlike the Members here. We have to answer to our boss, and our boss is the American people. Unfortunately, with regard to these regulations done by the executive branch agencies, I guess the only boss they have to answer to is the President.

In many instances, they're even independent of the President. Some of these regulations are not thought out in the real world. They're, in fact, thought out in the minds of somebody who sits at a desk and just thinks, This has got to be a good idea. Sometimes these good ideas overwhelm us in costs and, quite frankly, interfere with our lives.

So we've been talking about this. The American people are talking about it. When you go home, they want to know, What are you going to do about allowing the businesspeople to have an idea of what the playing field is going to look like? because these regulations are changing the rules every time we look up.

This leads us into what, I think, is another excellent piece of legislation that I'm proud to be a part of. My friend from Wisconsin (Mr. Ribble) is the actual originator of this bill, and I jumped on it with him because I thought it was a good idea.

So I'm going to yield to my friend and let him have a chance to explain this to you and what his idea was and why we both got into this mess of trying to make it clear for those who would make our economy grow, just exactly what the playing field looks like.

Reclaiming my time, you just said a magic word that I want to repeat--``responsibility.'' Our Founders designed our form of government so that we defined rights in our Bill of Rights, but it also points out where the responsibility lies. And I would argue that these creations of regulatory acts, it allows people to avoid being responsible. They pass a law in Congress for the timber industry, and they give the authority to a branch of the executive to write rules to implement that legislation, and it allows this Congress to hide from those regulations. It's one of the reasons I've been talking up here for a year and a half now about regulations.

We all know our rights. It's time for those of us who have accepted a position of responsibility to be responsible. And when an unknown bureaucrat in a cubbyhole somewhere in the vast jungle of offices in this town can write a regulation that affects the very lives of American citizens--and he's going to get his paycheck. Nobody elected him. He's not going to get fired. You don't get run off for writing that regulation. He has been assigned to do rules and regulations. He doesn't take responsibility for it. He's hiding as a bureaucrat back there as civil servant.

It's time for the Congress to step back up, based on the Articles of the Constitution that you just read, and take our responsibility. And then those of us who answer to the people every 2 years and every 6 years--they're our bosses. They're the people who have hired us for this job. And when they have one of these regulations, they have somebody they can go to and say, You need to be responsible for implementing the regulatory moratorium and for stopping these regulations. They are killing us.

Let me just give you some examples real quickly that we've gathered on just some stuff that--these are current events. This is like looking back at current events for the last 6 or 8 months.

EPA greenhouse gas regulations, the potential job loss as a result of those regulations, 1.4 million jobs; new utility regulations, 1.4 million jobs; offshore oil and gas lease delays, 504,000 jobs; offshore drilling permitorium--they say they are going to introduce permits, but then they just don't ever get right around to doing it--430,000 jobs; reclassification of coal ash as hazardous--it affects this area right here--316,000 jobs; the new boiler regs that are coming out, 60,000 jobs; the Alaska drilling delays, 57,000 jobs; the new cement kiln regulations, 15,000 jobs. Just that little block adds up to 4,182,000 jobs that regulations are going to add to the unemployment rolls at a time when we have got unemployment at 9 percent.

And, by the way, I like the concept that you introduced and explained to me: Go back to what the unemployment was at the time that this administration came into being, 7.8 percent. I think that's more than reasonable.

I think that's creative thinking. We need to get unemployment below 7.8 percent. But it's a good point to start, and it gives us an opportunity to target what I honestly believe and a lot of economists agree with: The real solution to this situation we're in with our country right now is to get Americans back to work.

The President believes one more stimulus. The last one didn't work. The massive spending, the trillions of dollars of additional debt we've accumulated in the last 3 years didn't quite work. It wasn't quite big enough. We need to do it just one more time. And this time it will push it over the top. Well, I just don't think that the American people are buying it. They're watching the current events of today, where we loan money to companies that didn't have a concept that was going to pay for itself, and they're going broke; where we threw money at a problem instead of putting some common sense into the problem.

As a businessman, you nailed it. And you were one. For a while in my life I was a small businessman. You've got to know what's around the corner. You can't hire somebody if there's unknown around the corner. Because when you hire them, you get around the corner, you might have to fire them because that unknown is going to make it to where it's not profitable for you to have this person who you hope will make your business more profitable. They would make it less profitable.

People don't seem to understand around here. They think people hire people because somebody gives them a tax incentive or there's some incentive. Somebody gives them a little extra money this month. No, you hire someone to make your business more profitable. It's about prospering in your business. If you don't need somebody to prosper your business, you're not going to hire them. And all of the incentives in the world aren't going to make you hire somebody that doesn't make your business work. Whether you're a little bitty business or the biggest business in the world, that's the way it works.

So the reality is, as they plan--and, you know, there was a time, I read an article on this, there was a time when business planning was relatively short term. In fact, one of the things that came out of the Great Depression was the concept of long-term planning, both short- term, mid-term, and long-term planning for a businessman because you needed to know not only what was around the next 2 years, or the next 5 years. You needed to know around at least the next 10 years.

That's one of the reasons why when we have these tax bills that we have passed that will just end on a certain day, well, if you know it's going to end, you have to plan around it. You plan to avoid it, but when that drop-dead date comes up like we've got on the Bush tax cuts they call them around here, businessmen are looking at those and asking: What's that going to mean to my bottom line? I don't know, so I'm not hiring. I'm not expanding my business. I'm not building a building because I don't know what that means. Unknown regulations in the minds of regulators could change my world, could absolutely shake my world.

So this--and right at this time in this economy, when the number one thing you hear from every businessman you talk to is the unknown, whether it be the new financial regulations which have made financing unknown, whether it be the hidden tax increases in the health care bill, or whether it be regulations that we don't understand that we were surprised to get, we don't know what's going to happen, so we're not doing anything. We're sitting with our hands in our pockets, hope there's a little money in those pockets while we sit there, and we're not doing anything until we know what is going on. That's why this moratorium is perfect--perfect.

Absolutely. You'd be dealing with the EPA. You'd be dealing with fish. You'd be dealing with the situation on endangered species, and that's clear down to the microscopic animals that you can't even see. All that. There's no way the Hoover Dam would get built like that.

There was a thing on the History Channel, I guess it was the night before last that I watched, about the building of the Alaskan highway. We had gone to war with Japan, and everybody looked at the United States and said my gosh, the Aleutian Islands, a part of the Alaskan-- at that time Alaskan Territory, they're right close to the Japanese, and they're probably going to invade those islands. And how are we going to get materials, supplies, and men up to Alaska? There was no road between the United States and Alaska.

Nobody checked a single regulatory act. Nobody did anything but say: Get every bulldozer we've got and head for the border. We're cutting a road straight up through Canada. We'll design it on the way up there. We'll direction it on the way up there. They took off and they built a road. It was a gravel road, but it was the first road that connected the lower 48 to Alaska.

I looked at that thing and I said: My gosh, they wouldn't have gotten a mile and a half before they would have been enjoined by every kind of group on God's green Earth in this country under the present regulations we have in place, not even expanded regulations which are getting worse, the present regulations.

So when the President made that famous statement now that I've enjoyed very much, he laughed and said that I found out shovel-ready today is not really shovel-ready. And it's exactly the same regulations we're talking about here that keep it from being shovel-ready.

We're building about a 21-mile stretch of highway in my home county-- trying to build one. We've been at it for 8 years. The money's in place. Section 1 has got bulldozers sitting on the ground because section 1 has been approved, and we're still trying to get 21 miles of road built through regulations.

I will say now, after a little work on our part, some regulators are being pretty reasonable, and we want to thank them for it. But the days of the Hoover Dam and the Alaskan highway will never come back, not with the regulatory environment we have here. What we're trying to do is not let this thing expand any further. We're not trying to kill species. We're not trying to mess up the air, like you said, or the water. We're trying to say we've got a good situation in place.

By the way, Mr. President, if it's a national security issue or a national emergency, submit it to us. Tell us what the emergency is. Let's visit with it, and if that's the case, this Congress will be reasonable. If we need review of the courts and the individuals need review of the courts, we provide that in here. It's very respectful of other people's consideration on these rights. For a small bill, there's a lot of good thinking in this bill.

Let me just read you something. This came out in the Columbus Dispatch. This is a quote from there:

Obama's massive intrusions into the heart of the Nation's

economy have not helped: Buying auto manufacturers and

running roughshod over bankruptcy law and investor rights in

the process, taking over the sixth of the economy devoted to

health care, imposing a new regulatory regime on the

financial sector and spending hundreds of billions of

borrowed dollars with no very great benefit.

Add to this the recent actions of the Democrat-controlled

National Labor Relations Board. Perhaps its most damaging

move has been to bring legal action against aircraft

manufacturer Boeing Company for building a manufacturing

plant in South Carolina. The NLRB seeks to punish a company

for creating new jobs, at a time when unemployment is more

than 9 percent and the Nation's economic growth barely

registers.

The chilling effect on other companies that are considering

building new plants is incalculable.

These moves have cowed, usurped, paralyzed or blocked the

private-sector decision-making that is necessary to get the

Nation moving again.

That's a quote from the Columbus Dispatch on 9/5/11, this year. And that's a perfect statement of a big picture of the regulatory burden that's made the papers. But you can have just as much trouble with one bug. So, as we deal with this, we've got to have something that says King's X until we get this economy back rolling.

I will once again yield to my friend, and you tell me if you've got other things you want to talk about.

That's good common sense. Thank you for doing that. We appreciate it.

Congressman Ribble, I understand you have some support for this bill in the Senate. Would you like to tell us a little bit about that?

And when the American people hear that once again we've got over 20 bills that could have done something to turn this economy around that have been tabled, I hope they will ask themselves, Why did the Senate table my job? Because everything's about jobs. When you table a piece of legislation, you're tabling somebody's job.

One of the things that a lot of people don't understand--and that's just because they don't think about it; once they start thinking about it, they can understand it--that they hear something like the pipeline. I happen to have spent every summer of my life from the time I was 15 until I graduated from law school working on pipelines. I have worked on pipelines in Texas, Louisiana, and overseas in the Netherlands in Europe, and in Belgium. So I'm an old laborer on the pipeline. When you hear ``pipeline,'' you think the pipeline of the pipeline. But the number of people involved in laying a pipeline and the number of assorted jobs you don't even think about that are involved in that are overwhelming. In many instances, you've got to cut roads out to where the pipeline is going to be. So you've got road builders involved, you've got gravel haulers, and in some instances asphalt layers, if the farmer will let you.

You've got the pipe. The pipe industry is making pipe. The welders are welding the joints. The people that are surveying are surveying the project. The heavy machinery is digging the ditch. Many individuals are cleaning the ditch with hand shovels because it's got to be a certain way, or you get a process which can cause the pipe to have an electrical charge on it. Engineers are engineering it; scientists are studying it. The product that's going to flow down that pipeline is being tested so that you see what stress levels you're going to have. It creates jobs, not just a pipe; but there are hundreds and hundreds of industries that are tied to just laying a pipeline.

If you're drilling an oil well, the same thing. Those offshore drill rigs, you know who got hurt bad on that? The guys that feed those people out there on those rigs and the helicopter pilots that fly the food out there. I mean, it shut down restaurants and closed down helicopter businesses in the gulf coast when we had the moratorium. We forget those little guys that are providing those services for the big ExxonMobil or some other platform out there. But in reality, there's thousands of small businesses connected to any major project like that.

A minimum number of jobs for that construction on the pipeline, it's been estimated, is 25,000 jobs. I can tell you, unless the world has changed a whole lot since I was a kid, it's the best-paying job for a laborer that I could find in the State of Texas for a kid my age. I worked until I was 26 years old on

those things in the summertime, and it still was the best-paying part- time job I could find anywhere in the State of Texas, or even better, in Europe.

So the point being that there is a domino effect when there is a big project like this, or the lumber industry you were describing in your State, or the shipping industry on the Great Lakes. It's not just ships that are involved in the shipping industry. It's hundreds of other professions that are involved in the shipping industry.

And when we start thinking about that concept, when you go out and hit the big guy--people around this country have got this idea that big guys, big things are bad, and they don't realize that it takes hundreds and sometimes thousands of little guys to keep the big guy's project going. They're all making a living and they're all raising their families and having their homes based upon that project. This is the concept of what capitalism does and free enterprise does for our country.

And when the regulators stop something like that pipeline, or when they put a moratorium on it until after the election so you don't have to talk about it during election time, that hurts little guys as well as big guys. And it's a wrong concept. We've got to make this country once again prosper, and it takes a lot of things to make it prosper. So we're just asking for the government not to be one of the hindrances. And I think that's what makes this a great bill.

We're just about out of time. I want to thank you for joining me and explaining the bill and allowing me to be an original cosponsor with you on this bill so we can work this together. I will do everything within my power to assist you in getting this bill to this floor and passed through this House; and hopefully Senator Johnson will get it done over in the Senate, and we'll help him where we can. And it will be good for America to say time out, time out on these regulations.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

I want to thank my friend from Texas. Thank you so much for allowing me to join you on the floor today.

I spent my entire adult life running my own business, so this is something that I've had the opportunity--or maybe the misfortune--to deal with firsthand. I found it interesting that, just a few weeks ago, on October 25, Politico ran an article which said right here: ``Regulations: Top Issue for Small Businesses.'' In fact, they cite a Gallup Poll that, indeed, 41 percent of small business owners said that government was somehow related to the biggest problem facing their companies. More small business owners view the costs of complying with government regulations as a bigger problem than any other issue.

I've heard this time and time again.

Just recently, I was up in northern Wisconsin, in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where three other Members of Congress and myself held an all-day session with the timber industry. We invited Chief Tidwell, from the U.S. Forest Service, to come in to talk about harvesting timber in our national forests. I had a timber manager come up to me who harvests timber up in the Wisconsin North Woods.

She said to me, Congressman, I want to show you something. If I do a timber sale here that's regulated by one of the counties here in northern Wisconsin, this is the contract that I have to fill out to harvest timber. That's the county contract.

Then she said, But do you know what, Congressman? If the State of Wisconsin manages that timber sale, the contract gets about twice as long, and I have to manage that contract. However, if the Federal Government manages the timber sale, this is the contract that we have to fill out for the Federal Government.

There are pages and pages and pages of bureaucrat red tape just to allow them to harvest timber that's owned by the taxpayer.

So I thought, after hearing a lot of these things and after having run my business, that maybe what this country needs more than anything--and I certainly support Congressman Davis' REINS Act. I think it's exactly the right thing to do. But I'll take it a little step further.

You and I together put together a bill called the Regulatory Moratorium and Jobs Preservation Act. This bill simply does one thing. It says that the government can't promulgate any new rules until unemployment goes below 7.8 percent, because you and I know full well, in talking to all the businesses in our own districts, that unemployment and regulatory environment are connected. They're linked together.

Now I will have colleagues from the other side of the aisle say to me, Well, Congressman, you know full well that this is all about demand, that demand is causing the problem; and without demand, people aren't going to hire. And I would say back that every single page of regulation, every single page of trying to comply, every single page has to be responded to by some business owner, and that means that response will have a direct cost to it.

As you pile on cost after cost after cost, there have been 24,000 new rules promulgated on the American business owner since 2004, nearly 1 million pages of new regulations. Every single page, page after page after page, adds costs. And every single time the cost of any good or service goes up, there are fewer customers that can afford that product, so demand must go down. So every time we add a new regulation, costs go up, demand goes down.

Finally, we've come to a new end game here with over 9 percent unemployment. So we wanted to connect our bill to unemployment so that we can show the American people, prove to the American people the empirical evidence that if we would put a hold on new rules and regulations, if we would inject certainty in this regulatory environment where business owners knew what future costs were going to be, they could measure future costs because they know that government won't promulgate a new rule, they will begin to hire again. That new confidence will be there, a new certainty will be there, and unemployment will go down.

Then, here's what I suspect will happen: As unemployment goes down, the American people will demand from Congress that we extend this rule until unemployment reaches 6 percent, or we get to full employment as we find this out.

Now, this rule does not remove a single safety net. This rule does not remove anything that's already there. I have heard people say, Well, you are just trying to destroy the environment, as if I don't want to breathe clean air, as if I don't want to drink clean water, as if I want my grandchildren to swim in lakes and streams that are polluted. It's ridiculous on its face. I want to breathe clean air like every American. I want to drink clean water like every American. I want to eat safe food like every American. And this bill will do nothing to remove any of those protections whatsoever. What it will do, though, is stop the administration from, by executive fiat, creating rules and regulations that haven't been created by this Congress. It will stop.

I was listening as my colleague from Kentucky was speaking, and I was struck by something. I was struck by this: Article I, section 1 of the United States Constitution says, ``All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.'' Now, that word ``all,'' three simple letters, is pretty inclusive. ``All,'' it means all of them. And what the REINS Act does, it says that any rule that gets promulgated, the Congress, the duly elected Representatives of the citizens of the United States, get to say whether that makes a law or not. We get to say because the Constitution gave us, the Members in this body and the Members in the U.S. Senate, the authority to execute legislative power, not some Federal agency. And this REINS Act will reel it in.

My bill and your bill, Representative Carter, will extend this control by the Congress, and it will simply return the

power back to our legislative, duly elected Members of Congress.

I couldn't agree more. As a matter of fact, unemployment has never been lower since the day President Obama was sworn into office.

I'm a freshman Member of Congress. I had the privilege of sitting in this Chamber for the President's State of the Union address. And the President said in that State of the Union address that he was going to ask for a regulatory review of the executive branch. He wanted to know what they were going to be doing, and he would make jokes about some of the ridiculous regulations.

And what we've done now--we've got one more President who's followed the traditions of dozens of Presidents who have ordered another study. In the meantime, the American people suffer while we study something that we already know. This is not so much about whether the government can create jobs. It's about whether the government is obstructing job creation, which is exactly what's happening. And that's why we decided to pick that number.

I think there is something salient here that we really need to hit on. We, you and I, believe, as do many of our colleagues and, more importantly, small business owners and large business owners alike believe that this type of bill will actually increase employment. The very interesting point about this is it doesn't cost the taxpayer a penny. What this will cause is businesses that have now been putting their money in the bank and have been holding it because of fear, we will unleash that money back into the private sector to create jobs and get this economy going, and not a single penny of taxpayer dollars will be expended as a result of this. This is a simple thing.

You know, since the President talked to us back in January, over 70,000 pages

have been added to the Federal Register. Seven thousand pages. 539 rules have been deemed significant under Executive Order 12866. Stop and think about these numbers: 116.3 million hours of annual paperwork burden being added. And all of this continues to create that uncertainty. Why would you as a business owner spend any money when you have no clue what that future cost will be.

And just recently, I was talking to some friends of mine in my district at Thilmany Pulp and Paper Company in Kaukauna, Wisconsin, the hometown where my roofing company is; and they were sharing with me their concerns about the EPA clean-air ruling and a new rule called Boiler MACT. They said if that rule was promulgated, Wisconsin's paper industry would be decimated. But what is really most troubling is the fact that this is a revision of a rule that they just put in place a few years ago. So the entire paper industry in Wisconsin had to upgrade their boilers, spend millions of dollars of investment; and then a few years later the EPA came back and said, whoops, we made a mistake, we need to move the bar up again.

And rightfully so, these business owners are calling their Congressman. This time it's me. I'm sure you've heard from them in your own district, asking: Well, if we spend another $50 million or $60 million, what assurance do we have that the EPA won't move the bar next year? And then we have to spend it again and again and again. At what point is clean air clean air? And that's the problem.

I'll tell you, it would be very simple, when you start talking in the millions and millions of dollars, it's very simple to lose thousands and thousands of jobs. This is exactly where our national economy is at right now. There has been an onslaught of regulations dumped on the American entrepreneur.

Let's talk a little bit about access to credit. I've been very critical about the Dodd-Frank bill. I understand the intent was to get at Wall Street, and I appreciate the intent of getting at the things that caused our economic crisis back in 2008.

But what actually happened is it got at Main Street. So small business banks in my hometown of Appleton, they are now spending money and investing money and hiring regulatory analysts when they ought to be hiring commercial lenders. You know, most jobs created in this country are created by small businesses. But in reality, it's really small businesses under 5 years old, businesses that need access to credit.

I often wonder would someone like Steve Jobs be able to emerge in this type of environment today, building computers in his garage. I'm sure there's some rule against that now. You can't imagine. I chuckled the other day when I saw a famous television host on MSNBC standing with her hard hat by the Hoover Dam saying we need big projects like this; we need big thinking like this. Franklin Roosevelt ushered in these great programs to create jobs and generate energy. This was the boom day of the American mind. I had to chuckle thinking there'd be no way with the current EPA that you could ever, ever build the Hoover Dam today. It just wouldn't happen. The environmental rules alone wouldn't allow for it.

I thank the gentleman for yielding.

I just thought it would be interesting, the President was in here just a few weeks ago with his jobs bill, and I was struck--I actually came into the Chamber with the intent of not really being critical but to try to find out what is it that we could agree on so we could maybe, for the good of the American people, move those things forward. But I was struck that the President didn't mention energy a single time.

Now, we've lost millions of jobs in the energy sector. Just recently, the President decided to punt on Keystone, the TransCanada pipeline which would have created thousands of jobs by even the lowest estimate, thousands of high-paying union jobs. Fully, labor was supportive of it, and he decided to kind of punt on that and not let jobs.

It seems like the President's jobs plan is really at the regulatory agencies where, since he's been sworn into office, employment has increased 13 percent. While the private sector is shedding millions of jobs, the President has decided to hire thousands of people at Federal regulatory agencies. Now, I guess it is may be so they can implement the 3,573 new rules that have been put in place since January 2010.

We have to get to a place where we understand the connection between employment, the connection between costs and jobs, and just American competitiveness. How in the world can we have businesses compete in this day and age when there's a constant onslaught from the Federal Government?

I thought I might read a quote from CNBC. We asked several CEOs leading up to the President's speech what bold steps President Obama could take to reduce the 9.1 percent unemployment rate. John Schiller, chairman and CEO of Energy 21 said:

If the government would get out of the way from a

regulation standpoint and let us, 21, do what we do good,

you'll see us continue to hire and grow this economy. I think

that's a message from across the board.

And I believe it is a message. For some reason, it just doesn't seem like the executive branch fully understands how this economy actually works. Obstacle after obstacle after obstacle, layer upon layer of new rules and regulations, and each one of them hurting job growth and employment in this country.

David Park, President and CEO of Austin Capital, said:

Regulations have companies running scared. They are coming

at businesses, and some new regulations are already taking a

toll while others will soon. This could be a real deterrent

to future entrepreneurs.

And since most jobs are created by entrepreneurial companies under 5 years old, the difficulty of actually even forming and starting a company today is burdensome, and it's hugely complex, all because of this endless stream of control and regulations as if Washington, D.C., as if you and I, Judge, have all the answers. We don't have the answers. The answers are found in the private sector. The answers are found in the citizens of this great country.

Recently, we passed a bill just the other day on ballast water. I sit on the Transportation Committee, and I noticed while reading the bill that the Federal Government was going to promulgate rules for ballast water for ships that come into the United States and traverse throughout the Great Lakes. Now, my home is in Appleton, Wisconsin, just near Lake Michigan, just south of Green Bay, Wisconsin.

We have the Port of Green Bay there, and the concern was--I was reading the bill--that the Federal Government exempted themselves, that they were creating a whole new level of bureaucracy, red tape and rules that they were going to promulgate on private shipping companies but not on themselves. So a Federal science ship or an EPA vessel could traverse the whole globe and not have to manage ballast water the same way that everybody else did. So I added an amendment, and this body passed it, that said that if the Federal Government is going to promulgate rules on private shipping companies, they have to live by those same rules themselves. It's high time that the Federal Government begins to treat the government the same way they treat the private sector. I think if we start doing that type of thing, some of these problems will begin to go away.

Yes. There's a companion bill that is going through the Senate right now. It's the identical piece of legislation. It was crafted by Senator Ron Johnson, a colleague of mine from the great State of Wisconsin. We thought it would be good for us to do a project together. We talk quite often, and the idea of attaching the moratorium to unemployment was Senator Johnson's idea. I thought it was a terrific idea. And he now has a companion piece of legislation. He told me that there are more than 20 cosponsors in the U.S. Senate.

And this bill now has over 70 cosponsors here in the House of Representatives, and it continues to move forward. I'm very optimistic that we're going to be able to pass this bill through this Chamber and send it on over to the United States Senate where I hope reason will rule the day, that they will see this doesn't remove a single safety, it doesn't restrict any safety or put something out of the way that's currently in place. It just says let's give the American entrepreneur, the American job creator, some breathing space. Let's give them some room to just have some certainty for the time being, until unemployment starts to get going and the engine of our economy starts moving again.

And I hope that, and I challenge the United States Senate, after we send this piece of legislation over to them, that with most haste that they go ahead and pass it. And if they can't pass it, let's for sure let the U.S. Senate have a chance and Members of that Chamber to vote on it. They kind of have a method over there where they can protect Members from having to make tough decisions. They just table a piece of legislation and don't even vote on it. And I would challenge the Senate majority leader that when we send H.R. 2989 over there, that they would actually bring it to a vote, and let's have our U.S. Senate stand up and say whether they agree with this or not and have them go officially on the record about whether they believe that regulations are a problem in this economy or not.

Thank you, Judge Carter. I appreciate your holding this tonight and your flexibility in allowing me some time to share as we've talked about before at times on the floor various aspects of the growth of the regulatory State.

The issue is not being against regulation or for regulation. The issue is having transparency and accountability. We've seen in this administration and the last administration, the administration before that, an ever-increasing reach in agencies where they're stretching the law, whether it's the Clean Air Act of 1972 that's being stretched to proportions far beyond the original intent of Congress or issues related to the Clean Water Act that stretch beyond the bounds of science, to unfunded mandates in No Child Left Behind from the last administration. We can think of a wide variety of these issues.

For me, I think the American public wakes up when it hits them in the pocketbook, when it hits you and me in the pocketbook. In our case, you probably experienced the same thing in Texas.

The year that I was sworn into Congress, a consent decree was forced upon our local community for nearly a billion dollars in storm water compliance that was not only beyond the needs of the community, it was beyond the economic capability of the community to comply.

That was based on a rule issued by an interpretation of a law that had been passed 8 years before in a different Congress, in a different political climate. And again, our citizens, the citizens of the Fourth District of Kentucky, citizens of districts across the United States, had no recourse but to comply with this.

One of my constituents walked in as we wrestled with different aspects of not limiting regulation but providing accountability, providing the opportunity for the voters, our citizens, to be able to hold the government accountable for what it does, walked in and said to me, ``Jeff, why can't you guys vote on this?'' And we had a revelation in a different way to come back and address the issue of regulatory transparency.

Standardization is important, but it needs to be at a place that the American people agree with and support and is practicable from the standpoint of cost. And the economic cost is often not incurred in this. We have towns across the United States, across the Ohio Valley whose compliance cost with just that regulation alone is more than what the budgets of the communities are on an annual basis. It's unreasonable, and there is no recourse.

So we went back and we researched and found a portion in the Congressional Review Act of 1995 that we suggested changing. And to the shock of many of my constituents, only one regulation has ever been repealed in the history of the Congress. That was the Clinton-era ergonomics rule that had the House, the Senate, and a President who would sign that.

So you have to get, in effect, a majority in the House, a supermajority in the Senate, and then have a Chief Executive who is willing to change that or to prevent that regulation from going into effect.

What we wanted to do was something a little bit different. It's done in industry; it's done in business. In effect, it's done in virtually all competitive sports, where, if something gets out of bounds or out of expectation, the game stops. In production, on the assembly line, when the red light comes on, the line stops, and people have to take an extra look at what the issue is. In this case, what we wanted to do was have a simple process to restore transparency and congressional accountability of what the executive branch does, which was the genesis of the REINS Act. It's really a very simple thing.

The REINS Act stands for Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny. It's H.R. 10 in this Congress. The number on the chart up there was from the last Congress, H.R. 3765. Basically, what it does is it requires Congress to approve all new major rules so that ``major rule'' is defined as one that has $100 million or more in cumulative economic impact across our country.

What our bill will do is really very simple.

Once a rule comes to the end of its 60-day comment period, it would have to come back up to Capitol Hill for a stand-alone, up-or-down vote under a joint resolution in the House, in the Senate, and then be signed by the President of the United States. It's making the point that for any major rule, a rule that reaches into the pocketbooks of all hardworking, taxpaying Americans, they have a right to be able to hold their elected Representatives and Senators accountable for the position that they take on that direct economic impact.

For me, I think it's fine. There are times that America will stand up and say, Yes, we agree with this, and this is the right thing to do. There are other times, particularly in hard economic times like today, when the last thing that we want to do is increase that regulatory burden, that out-of-pocket cost on America's citizens.

To give you an idea of this, the cost in 2009 alone for the compliance of regulation on our economy was $1.75 trillion. If some significant portion of that regulatory process were streamlined, that would be creating jobs and, ultimately, more taxpayers.

I think the gentleman has a great point. In fact, it comes down, I think, to about $10,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States of America for the cost of regulatory compliance.

To your point, why it's so critical now is that we've seen agencies in the last administration and in this administration that have gone into overreach. Most importantly, what we saw happen in the last Congress was a Democratic supermajority in the House, in the Senate, with a liberal Democratic President, who was out to keep his campaign promises. I can respect that. The American people spoke in that election, but they also spoke in the election that followed last year in that they did not agree with the overreach, be it legislative or on the regulatory side; and they made a change, certainly, in this body.

The administration proceeded at that point to attempt to enact cap- and-trade rules--an energy tax on every American--by regulation. When the Congress in a Democratic supermajority could not pass those bills in order to send them to the President's desk, they were intent on doing it by executive order.

It's the same thing that we see happening potentially with the card check-forced unionization bill. It could not pass in the last Congress, so we see attempts to move that by regulation. There are issues with unfunded mandates on our schools. We're even seeing an extension of that inside the Department of Education, which further hamstrings already strapped local school districts. It could not get through the United States Congress, so we're seeing attempts to do that by regulation.

What the REINS Act would simply do is say, Stop, Mr. President. Stop, Cabinet Secretary. You have to have the advice and the consent of the representatives of the American people before you're going to move for something that's going to hit us that hard. We have 197 cosponsors on the bill so far. Two hearings were held on this in the Judiciary Committee. It was passed out of the Judiciary Committee 2 weeks ago. We had a markup in the Rules Committee to go over some technical pieces inside of the bill regarding the timelines on vote triggers. It passed out of the Rules Committee; and we're looking for a vote here, hopefully in the very near future, to see it passed and sent over to the United States Senate.

I appreciate what the gentleman from Texas is doing to champion this move to not only awaken the American people to the huge economic impact of

overregulation, but to present a wide variety of legislative fixes that you and many of our colleagues have authored to stem this tide of overreach of the government and to allow our economy to stand up in energy, in manufacturing, and agriculture. With that, I thank you.