Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act of 2023

Mr. Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 495 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. McGovern), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

House Resolution 495 provides for a structured rule for consideration of H.R. 277, the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act of 2023 and provides 1 hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking member of the Committee on the Judiciary.

House Resolution 495 further provides for a structured rule for consideration of H.R. 288, the Separation of Powers Restoration Act of 2023. It also provides 1 hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking member of the Committee on the Judiciary.

House Resolution 495 further provides for a structured rule for the consideration of H.R. 1615, the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act, and provides 1 hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

This resolution further provides for a structured rule for the consideration of H.R. 1640 and provides 1 hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

Furthermore, House Resolution 495 provides for a closed rule for consideration of H.J. Res. 44 and provides 1 hour of debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking member of the Committee on the Judiciary.

These are five bills that may seem unrelated, but they are very related, and they have to do with the power of Congress and the fact that our power has atrophied considerably since the beginning of this country. In fact, we are almost a vestigial organ of this Republic at this point, we have ceded so much power to the executive branch, and that is how all of these bills are related.

Three of the bills seek to repeal laws or regulations that the administrative branch is unconstitutionally, I would argue, promulgating.

Two of these bills get at the heart of the matter, the problem that we have. One of them specifically is the REINS Act, which is very important. This would rein in our power to legislate.

I don't think our Founders would recognize our form of government at this point. They never intended for the administrators to be the lawmakers; yet here we are.

The Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act would send every major regulation that is suggested--and I say suggested--by the administration back to Congress where there would have to be a positive vote of the House and the Senate in order for that to go to the President and then, with his signature, become law, as all laws should do.

The other bill in this package that seeks to address the sort of chronic problem that we have here in Congress is the Separation of Powers Restoration Act.

It is basically a repeal of a horrible Supreme Court precedent called the Chevron deference that says, basically, any way the administration wants to construe one of our laws, they can get away with it.

The Supreme Court will give deference to the interpretation, no matter how far afield from the original interpretation the law was given from Congress.

Finally, the three bills today that deal with individual regulations, two of them deal with gas stoves. This administration has a war on gas stoves, depending on which person from the administration you listen to, a rule that is being promulgated by the Consumer Product Safety Commission and also by the Department of Energy.

There are two rules here. They would ban between 50 to 95 percent of the gas stoves on the market for arbitrary reasons. It is not clear that there would be any consumer benefit from banning these. In fact, consumers would suffer from this ban.

These are the types of rules that we need the REINS Act for. They would have a significant impact on our economy, and that is why they should be here in front of Congress, and that is why we are seeking to countermand them here today.

Finally, I think this is the most important rule that we are countermanding in legislation this week, and that is the pistol brace rule from the ATF.

We are not talking about an interpretation of a law where the EPA says, we think we should allow this much sulfur dioxide instead of that amount of sulfur dioxide and create a civil infraction where corporations could be sued or punished. We are talking about criminal penalties.

The ATF has twisted the existing statute, a law that was passed by Congress in 1934, and has magically reinterpreted it to create tens of millions of felons beginning on June 1.

We have a bad situation in this country right now where millions of people have been turned into felons, law-abiding individuals who are following the rules that were set forth by the ATF. That is why urgent action is required on the pistol brace rule repeal here today, and that is H.J. Res. 44.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I find it ironic that the gentleman on the other side of the aisle is demanding to know what the power-sharing structure is here in the House, when, in fact, he will spend the rest of his time arguing that we should give our power to the White House, that the administrative branch should be making law, in fact, major regulations that have more than $100 million of impact.

I would say to the gentleman on the other side of the aisle that if he is wondering about the power-sharing arrangement, then he should seek to put some power here in the House, restore the power that the Founders gave us in Article I of the Constitution.

With respect to the solution to the tragic school shootings, some States have taken it upon themselves to allow qualified teachers and staff to carry

firearms. Imagine that, the children are protected by firearms the same way we are protected here. Why do we sit here and say, oh, we have got to do something, when we sit behind protection and the children aren't?

I would encourage the other side of the aisle to cosponsor my bill to change the default setting here in this country. The default setting was set by the Gun-Free School Zone Act, which makes it illegal to even be near a school and have a firearm, which makes it harder for States to set policies that would save our children. All it does is make felons of law-abiding gun owners.

I would encourage them to look at a real solution. You can ban a pistol brace, but you are not going to stop a single mass public shooting. Most of these mass public shootings occur with a pistol, not a pistol with a brace on it or with a short-barreled rifle, as they would say, or with a rifle, an assault rifle they might call it.

They can start banning these pieces of plastic, like the Biden administration is doing, and then they can move on to banning magazines. As the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee admitted to me last night, he would like to ban all of the AR-15s. They could ban handguns. Then they will get down to shotguns. The reality is you can't stop these tragedies with a ban. You have to change the way we protect our children.

This pistol brace rule that has been promulgated by the administrative branch will cause--they just haven't been arrested--will cause and has already caused tens of millions of Americans to be felons. That happened on June 1. Time is up. You are done. You are now a felon if you own one of these braces on your firearm.

Whether you own one or not, most Americans understand what is happening here. Our system of lawmaking has been turned on its head. Even more fundamental than that, people were told it was legal by the ATF. The technical division of the ATF reviewed the prototypes of these pistol braces in 2012 when Obama was the President.

What did Obama's ATF say to Mr. Bosco, the inventor of the pistol brace? ``You are asking if the addition of this sample, a buffer tube forearm brace, would convert a firearm in a manner that would cause it to be classified as a `rifle' and thus a `firearm' regulated by the National Firearms Act. . . . `'

``Based on our evaluation,'' our technical department ``finds that the submitted forearm brace, when attached to a firearm, does not convert that weapon to be fired from the shoulder and would not alter the classification of a pistol or other firearm.'' ``. . . Such a firearm would not be subject to NFA controls.''

This is a letter on ATF letterhead, in fact, the Department of Justice letterhead, dated November 26, 2012, that millions of Americans relied on, that many entrepreneurs relied on.

Now what happens? The rug is getting pulled out from under them, but not by the legislative branch. By the way, we could have repealed this. The Democrats controlled both chambers. They could have passed a legislative ban on these braces. They didn't do it. Why didn't they do it? Maybe it is because they are accountable. They are accountable to the people, unlike these bureaucrats. Nobody is going to lose an election at the ATF for promulgating this rule.

The people here are scared. The people here in this Chamber are scared to do their jobs, and the people in the Senate are scared to do their jobs, so they would much prefer the administration do our jobs.

What have they done? What is the penalty for owning this piece of plastic on a firearm that is connected to a pistol? I asked the ranking member of Judiciary Committee last night in the Rules Committee meeting. He did not know. It turns out it is a quarter of a million dollars and 10 years in prison. Is that the appropriate sentence for somebody who followed the law for 10 years, followed ATF guidance that was given during the Obama administration and now doesn't even know they are violating the law? Is 10 years and a quarter million dollars appropriate? I don't think so. They relied on this letter.

Now, to another part of the pistol brace rule. The ranking member of the Judiciary Committee and the ATF Director Dettelbach have both testified incorrectly that you can comply with this pistol brace rule from the ATF by merely separating the firearm from the brace. That is wrong. That is not what the ATF rule says.

Why did they say this in testimony? Why did the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee say this? Why did the ATF Director say this? Because they wanted to sound reasonable. That may seem like a reasonable solution, but it is not the solution that the ATF has put into law.

Again, this isn't a fine. This isn't like saying the EPA decided that we have too much sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere so we are going to reduce emissions and set the sulfur dioxide emissions at a different level and you can be fined if you don't comply and you are a corporation.

This is not a civil infraction. This is a criminal infraction that will put millions of Americans in jeopardy of going to jail. For what, a piece of plastic? Does it make the firearm more dangerous? No. Does it make the firearm more concealable? No. Does it make the firearm more deadly? No.

Then I hear from the other side of the aisle: Oh, well, we are not banning them. Oh, we wouldn't ban them. Really? You are telling people in the United States you have to register them as short-barreled rifles. Guess what? That is illegal in 13 States. Thirty-six percent of Americans live in those 13 States where you can't even comply. You cannot legally comply with the ATF directive to register that pistol with that brace on it as a short-barreled rifle. Compliance is impossible if you want to keep that accessory. It is a ban. It is a de facto ban, especially on people in those 13 States.

Here is what it is really about. They can't ban guns. They would love to, but they can't ban them. They can't do it legislatively. The President came into office and looked at all of the regulations and how could he ban some guns. Well, he found this one here. How can he get more guns registered.

By the way, it is illegal for the administrative branch to create a registry of firearms that are in common circulation here in the United States. That is illegal. They are not allowed to do it in the administrative branch. What have they done with this pistol brace rule over there that we seek to countermand? They are going to create a registry of millions of Americans who own pistols who happen to have this brace.

I would argue this wasn't just a way to ban guns with certain accessories. It was a way to do something else that is not legal, not authorized by Congress, and that is to require millions of Americans to register.

To close out this pistol brace rule, I thank Mr. Clyde for introducing this resolution. It is absolutely necessary. It is very timely. I wish we had gotten it done before June 1 because now we have got millions of felons in the United States just waiting to be arrested; don't even know they are not in compliance. This ATF rule will do nothing to increase safety.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, as a father and a grandfather, my heart breaks when I see the victims of these deranged killers at schools and elsewhere. We need serious solutions.

I think it is an insult to the victims and families that banning a piece of plastic is going to save a life--it won't--or telling them that putting up a sign that says gun-free zone will save a life. It won't. It will cost lives.

When one of my former staffers was married for less than a year, she and her husband had a karaoke business, and she had a stalker who followed them to each of their events. She got a concealed carry license in Tennessee and carried her gun to protect herself from the stalker. This was Nikki who worked for me.

One night, they set up their business in a bar, and the sign said ``No Guns Inside'' because they served alcohol. Nikki left her firearm to protect herself in the car, but her stalker did not leave his.

He came into the bar and shot her husband viciously in front of her. She has to live with that. That is why she wants serious solutions. She knows that gun-free zones are unserious. She knows that banning pieces of plastic is not serious. She knows that children deserve the protection that we have here.

We all know, if you are willing to look at the data, that in every school that has allowed qualified teachers and staff to carry a firearm, there has never been a school shooting. It is a fact.

We need to work on serious solutions, not unserious solutions like banning a piece of plastic.

Mr. Speaker, going to the stove ban, which is also unserious, it is going to cost consumers. It is going to make the products less safe, not more safe. It is going to make them less available. It is not about safety or efficiency or consumer benefit. It is about banning fossil fuels. That is why this administration has declared a war on gas stoves.

Two of the bills in this package would repeal those rules from this administration.

Natural gas, when it is used in appliances, is 3.4 times more affordable than electricity. Why is that? Let's think about where that electricity comes from. A natural gas plant can burn electricity, spin a turbine, create electricity at maybe 50 percent efficiency and then put it on wires that are hundreds of miles long to go to a household. Those wires may be 70 percent, 80 percent efficient.

When it gets to the household, what do you do with that energy that came from the natural gas that is now electricity? You turn it back into heat if you have an electric stove, which is how this administration would want you to live.

Guess what? That is less than half as efficient. It costs 3.4 times more to do it that way than to create electricity with natural gas and then use the electricity at your house than if you just brought the natural gas to the household. In fact, consumers who use natural gas in their house save over $1,000 a year.

This is a war on the middle class and the poor. The war on gas stoves is a war on affordable heating and cooking.

When the electricity goes out in natural disasters, whose stoves work? The ones who have gas stoves.

Who can boil water to drink when the water is unsafe because of a natural disaster? Those who have gas stoves.

This administration should quit gaslighting consumers by telling them they are acting in their best interest. The Federal Interagency Committee on Indoor Air Quality has never identified gas stoves as contributing to asthma or respiratory illness. The Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency have never identified gas stoves as a significant contributor to adverse air quality or as a health hazard.

Why are they doing this? It is a war on gas stoves. These two bills would seek to reverse that. It is just common sense.

In fact, the other side of the aisle said these are messaging bills. Guess what? Some Democrats liked the message because they voted for these bills in the Energy and Commerce Committee. It must be a great message. It must be a message the American people want to hear. It must be a message that they like to hear because they know if we had the Senate and the White House, this kind of ridiculousness would not go on. That is why it is important to pass these two bills to protect our gas stoves.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I wonder, since we are proposing that children would be saved by banning a piece of plastic, has anyone on the other side of the aisle proposed that Congressmen are safer now that this piece of plastic is banned?

I don't think so.

Has anyone proposed that gun-free zone signs would keep us safe?

I don't think so.

What I see surrounding me here and right outside the door are people with firearms protecting us. Our children deserve the same respect and the same serious solutions.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy), who is my good friend and colleague on the Rules Committee, to speak in favor of the rule as he did in the committee.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time each side has remaining.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the other side of the aisle for pointing out that all the ATF rule does is change the legal status, that you can still get the brace and you can still get the pistol.

The last thing that is on a criminally deranged person's mind is: What is the legal status of my firearm? Is this a pistol? Is this a rifle? Is it a short-barreled rifle? How much time will I get when I go on this suicide mission for doing this because of the legal status?

However, what changing legal status does is it creates millions of felons out of legal firearm owners who presumed they were operating legally.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 30 seconds to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, 6,000 veterans signed a petition opposing the ATF rule, so I hope that is enough to convince the other side.

However, I now switch to two other bills that are in this rules package because this is Groundhog Day. We will be here again. The administration does something which has the effect of law, and then we are feckless to change it.

There have been over 90,000 rules promulgated since the Congressional Review Act was put into place. Only 20 rules have ever been countermanded because it is such a high bar to get a majority of the House and a majority of the Senate and the President to sign something to undo a law.

How did it become law? Just because the administrative branch willed it into existence.

Our Constitution says: ``All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and a House of Representatives.''

Does it say, and also an ATF or also an EPA? No, it does not. It says House and Senate.

Does it say, some legislative powers? No. It says, all legislative powers are vested in Congress.

The REINS Act would do quite a bit to restore our power. Not enough, though, because the Chevron deference still exists.

The other bill in this package is the Separation of Powers Restoration Act, which is a legislative repeal of the tragic Chevron deference that has plagued this country for so many years, where the Supreme Court gives full latitude, broad authority to the administrative branch to twist and contort the laws that we make in creating new laws.

I urge people to vote for this rule because it includes these two packages, which put our Republic back into a structure that our Founding Fathers envisioned, where the legislators make the laws, and the administration enforces the laws.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further speakers, and I am prepared to close.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to submit for the Record a letter to Speaker McCarthy, Ranking Member Hakeem Jeffries, and others signed by 11 veterans and military organizations in support of H.J. Res. 44.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time to close.

The REINS Act, which I would argue is the most important part of these five bills, is here, and we are debating it today because my constituent, Lloyd Rogers--who grew up in an orphanage in Kentucky, where he met his future wife in that same orphanage--sent this idea for this bill to his Congressman who preceded me.

Lloyd Rogers served in the Army during the Korean war. Then he came home, and he served as a county judge executive. He was shocked when he was trying to serve the people in his community at how many of the rules and regulations that tied his hands were never passed by Congress. He wrote this bill, and he sent it to his Congressman.

By the way, he and his wife were married for 65 years, and Lloyd turned 90 on Saturday. He is watching this debate.

This is how our Republic is supposed to work. Laws aren't supposed to come from unelected bureaucrats with no accountability. They are supposed to be ideas that people in our communities have that would make their lives better, and then we are accountable to them, so when they talk to us, we have to listen. They can throw us out every 2 years. Maybe they should throw more of us out every 2 years.

Lloyd came to his Congressman and said, please, put this bill on the floor. It went to legislative counsel. The Congressman introduced this bill, and it has been very popular. It is one of the most popular bills among the American people because they know the structure of our government intended by our Founding Fathers was for us to write the laws and for the administrative branch to execute the laws, not to write them themselves.

Mr. Speaker, I urge adoption of this rule, which contains five bills that I urge the passage of.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.

Mr. Chairman, I claim the time in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

This amendment requires the Comptroller General to include an estimate of a rule's effect on inflation in the congressional review report.

I oppose this amendment because it requires an estimate of a rule's effect on inflation, which would require the Comptroller General to speculate, based on limited evidence, how rules that likely have little to do with the economy would affect inflation.

The GAO has already reported to Congress that they would be unable to assess a rule's impact on the economy with the limited information available, and in any case, the 15 days provided for major rule reports do not allow for the GAO to make a determination on a rule's effect even if they had the necessary information.

Adding more requirements for various officials to estimate a rule's effect on the economy when they lack the necessary time and information to provide a concrete answer will not heighten the efficacy of this bill but will, rather, create more unnecessary estimates for Congress to weigh in their review of agency rules.

In addition, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has previously noted that estimating the total cost of regulations is inherently difficult and that such estimates of the cost of regulation should be viewed with a great deal of caution. Like the OMB, CRS has noted that there are significant methodological challenges to estimating and aggregating the total costs and benefits of rules.

I oppose this amendment because it focuses only on the cost of regulatory protections while completely ignoring the monetary benefits of those critical rules and because it asks the Comptroller General to do what is impossible to do.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, it is very nice to say that we should examine the inflation that has occurred and the spending that has occurred, but that is not what the amendment calls for.

The amendment requires the Comptroller General to include an estimate of a rule's effect, a rule that presumably hasn't yet been issued, on inflation in the congressional review report.

Now, I stated before why it is impossible to do that, why the CRS and the OMB say that there are significant methodological challenges to estimating and aggregating the total costs and benefits of rules. Therefore, we shouldn't be asking the impossible. It certainly has nothing to do with looking at prior expenditures or prior borrowing.

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

Mr. Chair, as I noted in our debate on the REINS Act last night, the REINS Act is aimed at undermining and frustrating the purpose of government by grinding Federal rulemaking to a halt.

By lowering the threshold of this dangerous bill from $100 million to $50 million, this amendment would make the REINS Act even more destructive.

I accordingly oppose this amendment for the same reasons I oppose the REINS Act at large. By requiring Congress to vote to approve and for the President to sign a resolution of approval for any major rule from the executive branch, we will be putting our constituents in harm's way.

Just last week, we saw how a small faction of far-right Republicans can hold the legislative process in the House hostage, all to make a point to the Speaker.

I oppose this amendment and the efforts of the majority to make the functions of government more political and subject to the whims of individual Members of Congress.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself the balance of my time.

The central fallacy of the REINS Act that I noted last night is that Congress can possibly legislate on all the things, on all the regulations that we have. There are thousands of regulations, and there must be for the safety of our people.

How many parts per billion of arsenic in the atmosphere are safe? Is it 15? Is it 20? Is it 200? No one in this body has the expertise to say that, but there are experts in the agencies who are trained to do that.

How much exposure to radiation from x-rays is safe for an individual? We are not competent to decide that. That is why Congress has delegated over the years these decisions to agencies to make on our behalf. We write the general law, and we delegate the general power to decide these specific questions, and they do.

The central fallacy of the REINS Act is that it would make us try to make decisions in all of this. That is bad enough. The REINS Act now says you have to have Congress vote on every decision over $100 million. That is bad enough. This amendment would make it over $50 million, which makes it even worse.

Mr. Chair, I oppose this amendment as I oppose the act, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. Chair, I claim the time in opposition.

Mr. Chair, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service has previously noted that estimating the total cost of regulations is inherently difficult and that such estimates of the cost of regulation should be viewed with a great deal of caution.

Like the OMB, CRS has noted that there are significant methodological challenges to estimating and aggregating the total costs and benefits of rules.

I rise in opposition to this amendment as it requires the OMB to make a specific determination of a rule's impact when they already say it is difficult to make an estimate of the impact.

This amendment requires the OMB to do the impossible, to make a specific finding when OMB and CRS have already said that even estimates are very difficult and inherently unreliable. To request a finding is to request the impossible, and, therefore, I oppose this amendment.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, I have expressed my opposition to the entire REINS Act because, as I said before, we are not competent. Congress cannot possibly decide how many parts per billion of arsenic is safe in the air for people to breathe or how many rads of radiation are safe to have in x-rays before it causes cancer. We don't know that. That is why we write general laws, and in those laws, we have delegated the power to make specific rules to agencies who are staffed by thousands of experts in each particular field. That is why the REINS Act is so pernicious, because it would stop this. It would make us make those decisions. We have no competence to make those decisions.

The REINS Act is bad enough, but this amendment, which says that OIRA must issue a finding for each rule determining whether the rule has a significant economic impact, given that OMB and CRS have both said that it is very difficult to make even estimates, you can't make a finding. A finding implies exactitude. Given the fact that even the estimates are very difficult and unreliable, a finding is impossible. The amendment should not require that someone do the impossible. Therefore, I oppose the amendment, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, this amendment is unnecessary. Congress already has many ways to control agency rulemaking. We can delegate authority to agencies with specificity, thus limiting the scope of an agency's authority. We can impose restrictions on rulemaking through appropriations. We can influence rulemaking through oversight activities. If all of these measures fail, we also have the blunt tool of the Congressional Review Act.

Therefore, we do not need the oversight the REINS Act offers, but we also do not need to open the door to revising rules that have been in place for years. Doing so would create uncertainty for businesses who have adapted to rules that were passed years ago and continue in force.

The current Congressional Review Act only allows Congress to roll back rules within a short time period. The CRA was drafted with a short period of review intentionally, and to open the door to reviewing years of rules would be a huge expansion of the CRA, and it would create too much uncertainty for businesses and for all other economic actors.

For these reasons, I oppose this amendment, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chair, the gentleman said that rules tell Americans what kind of cars they can drive. No, they do not. They do provide for the safety of the cars that Americans drive. They provide for all of the safety mechanisms that must be in the cars.

Again, Congress does not have the competence to know what safety mechanisms ought to be in the cars. That is why we have delegated rulemaking authority to agencies which have experts on how many parts-- I keep using this example--how many parts per billion of arsenic can be in the air, what safety measures must be in a car, et cetera.

The REINS Act violates this and is very dangerous to the American people. This amendment makes it even worse by essentially saying every rule has to be reviewed in 5 years by Congress. Congress can't possibly review all of these rules.

Therefore, this amendment will make Americans even less safe in many ways, and I oppose the amendment. I urge a ``no'' vote, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Mr. Chairman, we have a very clear difference of perspectives here. The gentleman talks about the right to life. I talk about the right to freedom. The right to reproductive freedom is a core human right that is protected by our Constitution.

The majority of the work our agencies do has little to do with the private decisions women make with the consultation of their doctors. In an effort to continue the culture wars, my colleagues have added this purposefully politicized amendment to signal that they, contrary to their supposed beliefs, do think that Big Government is good and that Big Government's reach extends to a woman's private decisions about what to do with her body.

All the rhetoric about the REINS Act is that Big Government is bad, that we should have less government. That is all the rhetoric of the Republican Party, generally. Yet, here they are, saying that government should reach into the private decisions of a woman with respect to her own body that were made in consultation with her doctor or perhaps with her husband or whomever. It is up to her, and government shouldn't determine her decision for her.

Mr. Chair, I oppose this amendment and the Republicans' crusade to create more laws about what we can do with our bodies and our reproductive decisions because government should not be in the business of dictating private decisions to private people.

Mr. Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, the Republican Party claims to be the party of freedom, but not when it comes to women and the decisions they make with respect to their own bodies. It is then the party of government repression and dictation.

You cannot do what you decide to do. You cannot do what you think is best. You must do what government thinks is best--namely, not have an abortion.

I proudly support the right to abortion. I believe abortion should be safe and legal. Whether it is rare is up to the individuals. It is a personal freedom. The Democratic Party supports personal freedom, unlike the Republican Party, which while claiming to support personal freedom seeks to repress it.

They are a party that says you cannot decide what to do with your own body, a party that says you cannot read what we don't want you to read, a party that says: Let's ban books. Let's ban plays. Let's take them out of the school libraries and out of the public libraries.

Some freedom.

Mr. Chair, I oppose this amendment. It is another example of the Republican Party's attempt to suppress freedom, and it must not pass.

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

Madam Chair, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.

Madam Chairwoman, while the estimate of the economic impact of any rule by the GAO would be highly speculative and should be considered with caution--as the GAO itself said--this rule would at least lessen the harm that this dangerous bill would effect.

Although this amendment does not cure all the ills in the REINS Act, the amendment would at least reduce the number of rules REINS would apply to, and, therefore, I support the amendment.

Madam Chair, I rise in opposition to the amendment.

Madam Chair, this amendment amends the definition of rule to include interpretive rules, general statements of policy, and all other guidance documents.

However, guidance documents from agencies are not given the force of law in court. Expanding this bill to also require any guidance the agency gives to businesses about how the rules will be enforced is a gross expansion of the Congressional Review Act and would ensure that agencies provide less guidance for business thus creating more uncertainty. More uncertainty in business stifles business.

Madam Chair, you want to know the environment you are operating in if you are a businessperson.

This amendment is an overstep and would stifle further the work of our agencies and would make it much more difficult to conduct business in this country.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I am prepared to close.

Madam Chair, at the risk of sounding repetitive from what I have said in several other amendments, Congress is not capable of making the judgments--the thousands and millions of judgments--on specifics like how many parts of arsenic per billion in the atmosphere is safe? What should the tolerance of a braking system in the automobile be? How many units of radiation can a person tolerate that is worth risking in an MRI or a CAT scan?

That is why Congress has delegated to agencies, which we created, the power to make these decisions which we are not competent to make, the thousands and thousands of specific decisions on scientific and other questions; mostly scientific questions.

The REINS Act is a very bad piece of legislation because it would say that the agencies can't do this, that Congress must do it, and we don't have the capacity. We don't have the time, and we don't have the knowledge.

How many people here know how many units of radiation are safe?

How many hearings must be conducted for the thousands or even millions of decisions that must be made each year?

The REINS Act is a bad idea. This amendment, in effect, expands the REINS Act to include interpretive rules and general statements of policy. It makes it even more impossible. Therefore, it makes a very bad bill worse, and I oppose it and urge its defeat.

Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, I claim the time in opposition.

Madam Chair, the REINS Act would already frustrate the point of government by grinding the critical actions of our agencies to a halt.

Why, Mr. Roy--and I presume the majority generally--feels the need to also include efforts to protect some of the most vulnerable among us is beyond me.

America has a long history of discrimination, and efforts to include these historically marginalized groups should be celebrated and supported, not subjected to further scrutiny by Congress just because the majority disagrees with supporting these individuals.

May I remind you that we represent all the people, and amendments like this undermine our service to our constituents.

I would ask, why should we tell hospitals not to perform certain medical procedures? If gender-affirming surgery is necessary for the patient and the doctor says it is, why shouldn't the VA hospital provide such surgery?

We do not, I presume, want to say it is because we want to discriminate against transgender people, or we want to discriminate against gay or lesbian people. I hope that is not what we are saying, but that is what this amendment seems to do.

I oppose this amendment because it goes against our notions of equality and our notions of fairness.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, the gentleman says: Why don't we legislate on some of this? We have.

Might I remind the gentleman that last year we passed the Respect for Marriage Act, codifying the rights of two men to marry each other or two women to marry each other because we respect freedom?

The amendment does not respect freedom. The amendment, by its description by its sponsor, would say, no, we don't want to do gender- affirming surgery. We don't want to perform surgery that people need because we disapprove of them. That is wrong.

The REINS Act is a very bad act for all the reasons I have stated many times already today. I am not going to repeat them. This amendment would make it worse because diversity, equity, and inclusion executive orders are things to be celebrated, not things to decry.

Madam Chair, I include in the Record a list of organizations opposing

Madam Chair, I demand a recorded vote.

Madam Chair, I claim the time in opposition to the amendment.

Madam Chair, yet again, we have another amendment aimed at dividing us instead of allowing us to serve the people who elected us.

Vaccinations help us eradicate terrible diseases, like smallpox, polio, measles, mumps, tuberculosis, rubella, and on and on and on.

Adding this amendment would not help us govern. It will not help us serve our constituents. Instead, it would just serve to undermine necessary health and safety rules.

We here in this Chamber cannot know what contagious diseases we may face in the future, and I oppose any amendment that would undermine our ability to protect our constituents.

Madam Chair, before I was allowed to go to school--I won't tell you how many years ago that was--I had to be vaccinated for diphtheria, for whopping cough, for the diseases that they then knew how to vaccinate against. Nothing has changed. We are to vaccinate people to prevent diseases and pandemics.

The fact of the matter is that people should be required to be vaccinated, especially a nurse, a nurse who is dealing with patients, who is breathing on those patients. She can transmit the disease. So certainly, she should be required to be vaccinated because the vaccination not only protects her, but it also protects against transmission of the disease to the next person. The healthcare worker certainly ought to be required to be vaccinated.

When we have a pandemic like the COVID-19 pandemic that we had, 2- year-olds should have been required to wear masks. It would be child abuse for parents not to do that because there was no vaccination available for 2-year-olds. The only way to protect them against COVID was to have them wear masks. These mandates are meant to protect the public's health and safety.

God willing we won't have another pandemic such as we had, but in the future, we will be required, I presume, to be vaccinated against major threatening diseases. That is right. To expand the major rule to include any increase in mandatory vaccinations is intended to prevent mandatory vaccinations. That is a crime against the public health.

Madam Chair, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Chair, why the COVID-19 vaccine should be more politicized than any other vaccine, I don't know. I don't understand that.

And why the COVID-19 vaccine is considered by the gentleman to be politicized, I don't understand that either.

It is just another vaccine. It is another vaccine for a very raging pandemic we just had and which is hopefully over--although people are still dying of COVID-19. People should get vaccinated against it, if they haven't been vaccinated.

But the REINS Act would make it much more difficult to require or even to drop the requirement for vaccination, and this amendment would specifically make it more difficult.

That is ridiculous from a public health point of view, therefore, I oppose the amendment.

Madam Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Kentucky for yielding me the customary 30 minutes, and I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, it is great to see you again. How are you? It has been a while. You look terrific.

We haven't had votes in what, 5 legislative days, all because some Republican Members decided to throw a temper tantrum last week on the House floor, wanting to rehash legislation that was passed the week before.

What we saw was essentially a fight between the rightwing and the extreme

rightwing. I mean, what the hell is going on here?

With each passing week, it becomes more and more obvious that the Republican Party is completely out of touch with what everyday people care about in this country.

We are bringing a new rule to the floor that incorporates the bills that we were supposed to do last week and adds an additional bill to make it easier to kill people.

I am told that the Republicans now have the votes to pass this rule. The question is: What was the deal? Better yet, what was the secret deal to convince the Republicans who were problematic last week to go along to get along this week?

Reading the press, we see that members of the Freedom Caucus are saying they have this deal on power sharing.

I am not quite sure what that means. Power sharing with the Speaker and the extreme rightwing; is that the deal?

We hear from the Speaker that there is no deal on anything. I don't know what the truth is. Maybe my friend can enlighten us at some point about what the truth is.

My Republican friends like to say that this place should be run like a business. Well, if they really believe that, then this place should be out of business because this is not the way Congress should be run. This is not the way you run a democracy. This is ridiculous.

Democrats have worked tirelessly to try to lower costs for people, bring jobs back from China, rebuild our country, fight pollution, and keep our communities safe.

Republicans? What do they stand for? Well, forgive me if I say I am not entirely sure because right now, the only thing I have seen so far since they took over is dysfunction and disarray.

Republicans began this Congress by wasting a week fighting with each other about who would be Speaker. Now we are 5 months in, and they have enacted five laws.

One a month. Boy, what an achievement. Even Democrats and President Trump were able to enact 21 laws at this point.

The far right fringe of the Republican Party, the same fringe that demanded Speaker McCarthy give them all of his power, has succeeded in even dictating to him what bills he can and can't bring to the House floor.

This is important. I want the American people to understand who is in charge here right now. It is not the Speaker of the House. It is not Kevin McCarthy. It is the far right of the far right.

We have sitting members of the Republican Conference right now openly advocating for civil war. These are the people calling the shots. Are you kidding me?

In what world should the 11 most extreme people in the Republican Party get to dictate the entire agenda of a legislative body that represents 332 million people? What are we doing here, Mr. Speaker?

We have smoke from wildfires clogging up our air. Scientists are telling us we need to do more on climate change, yet we are passing messaging bills about gas stoves.

By the way, that is not even me calling them messaging bills. It is the Republicans saying that. This is a Republican: We do not need to leave D.C. early because messaging bills are not coming to the House floor. That was Congresswoman Boebert last week.

How about this one: When we pass things around here that are messaging bills that don't do anything, is it really a loss that we aren't passing anything?

I mean, their own Members are saying that the bills they are passing do nothing. Essentially, they are just playing a messaging game. Is this really the best we can do with all of the challenges that we face in this country and around the world?

Meanwhile, our constituents are begging us and they are pleading with us to do something about gun violence in this country. What do Republicans do? How do they respond? By bringing to the floor a bill that makes it easier for the next mass shooter to kill more people. It is sick.

Mr. Speaker, killed were: 9 people outside a bar in Dayton in 2019; 10 people, including a police officer, at a grocery store in Boulder in 2021; 5 people in an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs in 2022; and 6 people, including children, at a school in Nashville just a few months ago. What do they all have in common? They were all killed by mass shooters who used stabilizing braces.

By the way, the ATF rule that the Republicans are trying to overturn, contrary to what they say, doesn't even make stabilizing braces illegal. It doesn't ban them. All it does is it says that you need to register braces because they are used in a lot of mass shootings.

But for Republicans, any amount of commonsense gun safety regulation is too much. Why? Because the NRA says so.

Our kids are being slaughtered, for God's sake. Does anyone care? Do my Republican colleagues care at all that America's parents stay up wondering whether their kids will be the next one shot at school or at a mall or at a movie theater or at their own graduation?

People come up to me all the time and they ask me: Why can't Democrats and Republicans just work together? I tell them I wish we could. There was a time when we did.

I say to them: Go online and Google the bills that Republicans are bringing to the floor. Ask yourself why Republicans oppose background checks on a gun accessory that mass shooters use to kill people. Ask yourself if it is right that this bill was introduced by a Republican Member of Congress--and you are going to love this--who owns a gun store and makes millions of dollars by selling guns and these types of gun accessories that mass shooters use to kill people. Ask yourself if it makes sense that the only reason this bill is even on the floor is because Speaker McCarthy isn't even in charge of the House schedule anymore; the far, far, far right is.

The craziest thing is this rule was inspired by guidance published under the Trump administration. Let me repeat that. Even the Trump administration thought it was necessary to further regulate stabilizing braces. I can't believe I am about to say this, but I agree.

If you want to know why we can't have real action when it comes to gun safety, follow the money. In the last decade, the NRA has spent more than $100 million to help elect Republicans who will support their extreme agenda. Follow the money. It is no surprise that the far right is demanding this bill, but it is a shame.

How many more mass shootings need to happen? How many more kids need to die before my Republican colleagues pull their heads out of the sand and say the NRA's blood money is not worth the damage that is being done to our country?

I wish I was wrong, Mr. Speaker, but sadly the cowardice and moral bankruptcy on the other side of the aisle seems to know no bounds.

Between the new concept of power sharing in the House, which really just means that the Speaker is going to have to keep a tiny minority of extremist Members happy for the House to be able to function, and the fact that their party's frontrunner for the 2024 Presidential election is being indicted with very serious charges for the second time this afternoon, I am sorry to say the Republican Party is a train wreck, and it doesn't bode well for what is to come.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, let me say a couple of things. First of all, nobody is talking about banning anything here. What we are saying is that an accessory that has been used in a number of mass shootings be registered. That is it.

By the way, the gentleman said the administration should not be making laws. The administration is not making laws. They are administrating and enforcing the laws that we have passed, and they do that through regulation and rulemaking. I am not sure what the gentleman is talking about.

Let me also say that he keeps on saying that this bill will turn gun owners into automatic felons, that by owning or buying one of these stabilizing braces, American gun owners will become felons. That is just not true.

By the way, I should tell the gentleman, someone has to be convicted of a crime in a court to become a felon. Let me give him an example, one that he might be able to relate to. Despite being charged with 37 counts for mishandling classified documents, former President Trump is not a felon. He only becomes a felon if he is found guilty of the crimes that he was charged with and is sentenced to a year or more in prison, which may very likely happen.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to include in the Record an article from the Washington Post titled: ``Here are the 37 charges against Trump and what they mean.''

Mr. Speaker, before I yield to my next speaker, I have to say, we heard a lot of words from the gentleman and from other Republicans who speak on these issues. Do you know what we don't hear? We don't hear any empathy for the families who have lost loved ones to gun violence.

I began my opening remarks by citing examples of how this accessory was used in mass shootings. Children, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, and grandfathers lost their lives. They were murdered. Police were murdered. There is not even any empathy. There is no acknowledgment that this is a terrible tragedy.

All we hear about is: Don't take away my toys. Don't interfere with my hobby. You can't register any of these things.

I think people are so sick and tired of where our priorities are. People are sick and tired of having the National Rifle Association and all of their money dictate what our policies should be on guns. They don't care about all the people who have died and have been murdered in this country.

By the way, other countries have similar challenges and problems that we do, but they don't have the level of gun violence. They don't have massacres on a regular basis. This is what we get. Enough.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Georgia (Mrs. McBath).

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentlewoman from Georgia.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, we didn't call them messaging bills. Members of the Republican Conference called them messaging bills, I would remind the gentleman.

The gentleman says that we need serious solutions to gun violence in this country. I think I heard the gentleman correctly, that he is suggesting it is okay for people to carry guns into bars when they are drunk. I don't think that is very serious.

The idea that we can shoot our way into gun safety is insane. We already have more guns than people in this country. We are the only country in the world that has massacres that occur on a regular basis.

The gentleman is saying that people should be able to carry guns into bars when they are drunk, that we ought to give teachers more guns, and that everybody ought to have more guns and everybody will be safe. This is insane. It doesn't make any sense.

At some point, people are going to have to have the courage to stand up to the gun lobby and say no to the NRA's money and actually do what is in the best interest of the American people, do what will protect the people of this country. To hear this nonsense--this place is crazier than usual.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett).

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 30 seconds to the gentleman from Texas.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. This is strange what we hear on the House floor today. My friends keep on talking about veterans and people with disabilities, but I don't see any major veterans organization or disability organization that has endorsed this bill. The gentleman talks about the fact that we have security here. Yes, the Capitol Police who protect us all have had background checks and have all had training.

It is interesting that we have a rule when my friends are in charge where you can't bring weapons on the House floor. I feel good about that after I have listened to some of my colleagues here today.

I also remind the gentleman that there were police officers at Uvalde. We hear from police officers and organizations all across the country all the time how they don't want to have to get into situations where they are battling with somebody who has an AR-15.

People are dying in this country on a regular basis. Massacres are happening on a regular basis, and we are on the floor to basically make it easier for people to have access to an accessory that can make a gun more deadly and more accurate that can kill more people. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. All I can think of is the fact that some of my friends are afraid to take on the gun lobby. They are afraid to lose their money. $100 million in NRA money went into campaigns in the last 10 years--$100 million. We have to get our priorities straight here in this Congress. We have to put people ahead of guns. Mr. Speaker, I am going to urge that we defeat the previous question, and if we do, then I will offer an amendment to the rule to provide for consideration of a resolution which states that it is the House's duty to protect and preserve Social Security

and Medicare for our future generations and reject any cuts to these essential programs.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of the amendment in the Record, along with extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Casar), to discuss our proposal.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

Mr. Speaker, I won't hold my breath waiting for the other names.

It is astounding to me that my friends on the other side of the aisle don't want any gun laws. Basically, they lack empathy for the murders and deaths in this country that happen on a regular basis. I mean, at some point, we have to say enough is enough. They have to put people ahead of the gun lobby, and my friends are incapable of doing that.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from New Mexico (Ms. Leger Fernandez), who is a distinguished member of the Rules Committee.

Mr. Speaker, may I inquire of the gentleman how many additional speakers he has?

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time to close.

Mr. Speaker, we have real problems in this country. I mean, the Northern Hemisphere was on fire. You couldn't walk outside last week without a mask in Washington, D.C., New York City, or a number of major cities and communities all across the Northeast. Our

planet has a fever. I mean, we have a real issue here with climate change, but we don't talk about those things.

There are a zillion issues that we need to deal with, but instead we come to the floor with--this is what the Republicans have said-- messaging bills. Those are their words, not mine. These messaging bills promote their culture war against gas stoves, and these messaging bills, I guess, make the NRA even happier.

The gentleman talks about veterans who want this. There are 16 million veterans in this country. If this were a priority of our veterans, these major organizations would be supporting this bill, but they are not.

The bottom line is, we are here talking about stuff that will not help anybody. In fact, this gun bill just makes it easier for people to kill people.

Why are we doing this? This makes absolutely no sense.

Last week, my Republican friends fought with each other, and nothing got done. This week, we are bringing bills to the floor that Republican Members are calling nothing more than messaging bills.

Congress was created to help solve problems, to help people. My Republican friends think that that is a foreign idea. This is helping nobody. It is a joke that we are here today bringing this horrific bill to the floor basically so that the NRA can be happy and justify another $100 million into their campaigns.

People are dying every single day in this country, and we hardly hear a word about it from the other side of the aisle. In fact, during this debate, very little was even acknowledged in terms of the people who are dying in this country. We can do so much better.

I used to have a history teacher who used to say the world will not get better on its own. I didn't really know what he was talking about when I took the course, but I do now. Nothing good happens unless good people come together and make change.

There have to be some reasonable people on the Republican side who understand that gun violence is out of control. We have more guns in this country than people. We can't shoot our way out of this problem, and yet that is what my Republican friends are suggesting.

Enough is enough. We need to get back to doing the people's business.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on the previous question, vote ``no'' on the rule, and vote ``no'' on all this garbage messaging legislation that will follow. We are here to solve problems, to make people's lives better. Let's do something that actually makes the American people proud of this Congress. This is embarrassing.

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

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Mr. Speaker, I demand a recorded vote.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume, and I thank the gentleman from Kentucky for yielding me the customary 30 minutes.

With all the very real issues facing our great Nation, it is really disappointing that once again the House majority has decided to waste valuable time and resources to promote a bunch of half-baked legislative ideas and stir the culture wars pot with MAGA conspiracy theories.

The bills that we started considering yesterday in the Rules Committee and will debate and vote upon in the next couple days, consuming an entire week of scarce legislative time, will do nothing to address the most pressing issues our constituents are begging us to address: gun violence, affordable health and childcare, the growing impact of climate change, Social Security solvency, immigration, and national security.

Worse, the antigovernment philosophy inspiring these bills will ultimately harm Americans by creating dangerous bottlenecks in critical government functions, misrepresenting the role and actions of the Federal Government, and disrupting the government's ability to protect Americans from harm.

Let's get some facts straight. While our colleagues across the aisle have framed their argument as necessary to ensure that Congress exercises its legislative function, they completely ignore the fact that the Federal agencies and rulemaking processes they are attacking have been established by Congress to undertake specific functions. That includes rulemaking, which is delegated to the agencies by Congress and ensures that they implement policies using the best and most recent expertise available, for the benefit of the American people.

By enlisting the assistance of Federal agencies to administer the laws that it passes, Congress fulfills its constitutional mandate, the mandate for our entire government to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to our colleagues.

In other words, working together with the other branches, our government is charged with accomplishing certain basic goals for the American people. The regulatory process that our colleagues seek to frame as a battle against a vast bureaucratic conspiracy is actually an essential part of ensuring that we all have clean air and water to breathe and drink; healthy food to eat; safe planes, trains, and automobiles to travel in.

In reality, regulations mean that when a senior goes to the pharmacy to pick up their prescriptions, the lifesaving medication that they will take is both safe and effective.

When you boil it down, rules and regulations are extremely tangible ways that the Federal Government protects people's health and safety and helps create a fairer economy where everyone has a chance to succeed.

Subject matter experts at agencies craft these regulations, many based on highly complex and technical data. Once a rule is proposed, it undergoes an often years-long rigorous review in which comments are solicited from the public, business interests, and other agencies.

Of course, these rules and regs are issued in response to congressional directives. They are an important step towards implementing laws that Members of this body have passed while representing the people back home who elect them to come here.

We can see examples of successful rulemaking all the time across the country. Before the Clean Water Act, the Delaware River, which runs alongside my district, was so polluted that it stripped the paint off passing ships. These days, you can safely kayak on the river thanks to regulations developed by agencies to carry out that law.

While the regulatory process can always be improved upon, the proposals we are considering today are not good-faith improvements or efforts to provide checks on the regulatory process.

The first of these bills is H.R. 277, the REINS Act, which would turn the administrative rulemaking process on its head, requiring every major rule--of which there are dozens and sometimes hundreds every year--to be passed again by both houses of Congress and signed by the President.

Remember, these rules have been developed in the first instance as a result of congressional action.

What the REINS Act is really doing is creating a process that will cause

gridlock that then Republicans, or other political operatives, can take advantage of to stop rules they don't like.

The burdensome requirements of H.R. 277 are simply not needed because Congress already has multiple opportunities to shape or rescind major rules if it disapproves of them.

We can hold hearings and offer public comment. We can disapprove major regulations before they take effect, or we can rescind those regulations under the Congressional Review Act.

On that last point in particular, I will note that this majority has moved these types of measures through this Chamber already many times this Congress.

In addition, we can also pass legislation to change laws or regulations, if we so please. Of course, we are considering bills today to do just that.

I know my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are aware of the avenues through which Congress can review and reverse rules. I know it because they use them, or try to use them, week in and week out.

For them to paint a bill like the REINS Act as a noble effort to empower Congress is disingenuous, and, ultimately, it diverts attention from the disastrous consequences this legislation would actually create.

Effectively, the REINS Act nullifies all new rulemaking by any administration, whether Republican or Democrat, and it would bring government operations to a standstill. Any new regulation would have to be passed by Congress in order to take effect.

So let's think about what that would really mean. A Congress, with a House majority that would rather bring the country to the brink of default instead of paying bills that Congress has already approved, would have to vote on every new major regulation from every Federal agency.

If that doesn't scare you, the Senate, hardly a model of expeditious legislation, would need to do the same.

In addition, the bill might actually be unconstitutional because it creates a mechanism in which one House of Congress can effectively veto an agency's rule by simply not acting on it within a 70-day legislative time frame.

This, in effect, is indistinguishable from the one-House legislative veto that the Supreme Court held to be unconstitutional in Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha.

The unfortunate truth is, Congress struggles every day to meet the most pressing needs of the American people. There aren't enough hours in the day, year, or congressional term for us to weigh in on all the regulations that we would need to implement the laws that we are passing.

Under this policy, crucial regulations would be left to languish unacted upon, and the health, safety, and welfare of the people we are supposed to serve would be in jeopardy.

In addition to the REINS Act, there are three other bills that my colleagues are pushing through today which would also undermine the regulatory process and threaten public welfare and safety.

H.R. 288, the SOPRA Act, eliminates the decades-long standard for judicial review of agency decisions. That is a precedent that rests, in part, on the understanding that Congress delegates to agencies certain authorities to carry out the laws that it passes.

It is clear that all the talk on the other side of the aisle about this being to restore power to Congress is empty words because this bill actually incentivizes unelected judges, not Congress, to make and enact policy from the bench. Ultimately, it would slow the rulemaking process and skew it toward more powerful, well-funded, and often corporate litigants, which may be the point.

Finally, the two gas stove bills that our colleagues are pushing this week actually demonstrate some of the flaws in the REINS Act; chief among them, the ready availability of alternatives to the REINS Act proposal and the dangers of politicizing the rulemaking process.

H.R. 1615 and 1640 are fearmongering attempts to prevent the enactment of standards to make gas stoves more safe and efficient and would hinder agencies' abilities to address potentially dangerous consumer products.

The majority's trumped-up battle to defend gas stoves from the Federal Government is nothing more than a conspiracy theory cooked up to embroil Congress in culture wars that shed more heat than light on the issues facing our Nation and are likely done so with a healthy helping of fossil fuel lobbying dollars.

Contrary to the heated rhetoric from our colleagues across the aisle, the Federal Government has not proposed to remove appliances from Americans' homes. That persuasive falsehood has been repeated for months by partisan hacks like Tucker Carlson to stoke grievances and cause chaos.

H.R. 1640, the Save Our Gas Stoves Act, nullifies new, congressionally mandated energy efficiency standards for gas stoves, for new gas stoves only, that would save consumers up to $1.7 billion in energy bills and cut down on emissions that are being shown to be particularly dangerous to children's health.

Most of us are familiar with these energy efficiency standards, and we rely upon them when we purchase new appliances like stoves and freezers and furnaces. I know that I do because it is the responsible thing to do as a consumer from both an environmental and an economic perspective.

Contrary to my colleagues' assertions, half of the gas stoves on the market today would meet the standard, and the remainder would have 3 years to make the necessary and already available adjustments to bring their new stoves into compliance.

H.R. 1615, the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act, is even worse because it threatens the government's ability to identify and regulate unsafe gas stoves, including those with design defects that could cause injury or death to American consumers.

Just last year, the Consumer Product Safety Commission recalled a gas stove that had sent multiple people to the hospital and placed many more at serious risk of injury or death from carbon monoxide poisoning.

This bill would have prevented the recall of that dangerous appliance and would prevent the Consumer Product Safety Commission from addressing other dangerous appliances in the future. It is simply irresponsible to jeopardize the health and safety of Americans in order to promote conspiracy theories for the far right.

Overall today, my Republican colleagues take a misguided approach to the issues facing rulemaking and Federal regulations. It is clear they don't want to make the government work better. They want to break it.

They would rather allow polluters and corporations to wreak havoc on our environment, children's health, and working people's livelihoods. They would prefer to decimate a regulatory process that improves the lives of Americans every single day.

The Federal Government has long played an important role in promoting the health, safety, and welfare of the American people, and we need to ensure that it can continue playing that role.

Madam Speaker, I strongly oppose these bills, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Doggett).

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to include in the Record a Politico article titled: ``What the right's gas stove freak- out was really about.'' That is dated January 14. The first line is: ``No, President Joe Biden isn't coming for your gas stove.''

I also note that, in that article, it talks about the multiple studies now that are investigating the impact of gas stoves on asthma, including by the American Lung Association.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Texas (Ms. Jackson Lee).

Mr. Speaker, I yield an additional 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Texas.

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

My esteemed colleague from Kentucky talked about the popularity of the REINS Act, but I suggest that that popularity is overstated. The REINS Act has been introduced by its extremist advocates for more than a decade without ever being enacted into law, even when Republicans held both Houses and the White House. I would suggest that it is because saner heads have prevailed and understood that enactment of the REINS Act is bad for America.

Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to provide for consideration of a resolution which states that it is the House's responsibility to protect and preserve Social Security and Medicaid for our future generations and reject any cuts to these essential programs.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of my amendment into the Record, along with any extraneous material, immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

Mr. Speaker, Social Security and Medicare are vital to many of our constituents' economic and health security, yet many of my friends across the aisle have called for major cuts to these critical programs.

In fact, just last week, Speaker McCarthy announced he was forming a bipartisan commission tasked with looking at budget cuts and suggested that Social Security and Medicare could be on the chopping block, saying: ``We have to look at the entire budget. . . . The majority driver of the budget is mandatory spending. It's Medicare, Social Security, interest on the debt.''

It wasn't too long ago that I remember some of my Republican friends calling the President a liar during the State of the Union when he suggested that Republicans were willing to put Social Security benefits on the chopping block.

Now, instead of debating gas stoves and the finer points of administrative law, I am giving my friends on the other side of the aisle a chance to reassure the American public and unequivocally state these programs won't be cut, not just with rhetoric but also with their votes.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from Missouri (Ms. Bush), to discuss our proposal.

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

Once again, my colleagues on the right are reverting to their favorite tactic when confronted with real problems in the real world: distraction to conceal that they are doing nothing.

They propose to grind the gears of government to a halt to impose an extreme ideology that Americans as a whole do not support, just as they threatened to tank our entire economy to impose other extreme cuts that even their own party members couldn't support.

They want to ensure that we can do nothing with these bills, that we can do nothing to protect kids from pollutants and dangerous products, to keep businesses from scamming working families out of money, or to ensure that the food people eat every day is safe.

Imagine an FDA that can't issue new food safety and drug regulations, or an EPA that can't keep our drinking water clean, or a VA that can't properly serve our veterans, or a Department of Transportation that can't enforce safety standards for cars, trains, or airplanes. This is what the majority is proposing, and it is a very dangerous vision for America.

The people who elect us to Congress depend on us to make their and their children's lives better, and doing nothing will not accomplish that goal. If anything, we need to make our government more responsive to the needs of the people. We need to do better, not nothing at all.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to oppose the previous question and the rule, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.

Madam Speaker, by direction of the Committee on Rules, I call up House Resolution 463 and ask for its immediate consideration.

Madam Speaker, for the purpose of debate only, I yield the customary 30 minutes to the gentlewoman from Pennsylvania (Ms. Scanlon), pending which I yield myself such time as I may consume. During consideration of this resolution, all time yielded is for the purpose of debate only.

General Leave

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their remarks.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Last night, the Rules Committee met and reported House Resolution 463, providing for the consideration of four measures: H.R. 277, H.R. 288, H.R. 1615, and H.R. 1640.

The rule provides for H.R. 277, the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act, also known as the REINS Act, to be considered under a structured rule, and provides for 1 hour of general debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on the Judiciary or their respective designees. The rule makes 15 amendments in order.

The rule provides further for H.R. 288, the Separation of Powers Restoration Act, to be considered under a structured rule, and provides for 1 hour of general debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on the Judiciary or their respective designees. The rule makes one amendment in order.

Additionally, the rule provides for H.R. 1615, the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act, to be considered under a structured rule and provides for 1 hour of general debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce or their respective designees. The rule makes two amendments in order.

Finally, the rule provides for H.R. 1640, the Save Our Gas Stoves Act, to be considered under a structured rule and provides for 1 hour of general debate equally divided and controlled by the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Energy and Commerce or their respective designees. The rule makes three amendments in order.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Our constituents didn't elect us to come here and eat fancy dinners and go from one fundraiser to the next, take lavish trips, and rub elbows with important and famous people. They sent us here for one job: Pass laws or, in some cases, repeal laws. Set the rules under which they will live under; and then we are accountable every 2 years.

The Founders were very wise. Some people complain, but every 2 years our constituents have a chance to replace us if the rules we have set aren't in their favor. They have no such choice with bureaucrats.

Our Founders didn't set this system up for bureaucrats to make the laws. Excessive regulation stifles economic growth, hurts small businesses, and raises consumer prices.

In fact, much of the inflation that we see in the sectors of food and energy is due to overregulation. It is vital that Congress act to reduce our regulatory burden now, which raises consumer prices, reduces wages, and costs jobs.

I think the American people watching this debate are somewhat vexed that the other side of the aisle says we need to give up more power to the executive branch when they sent us here to do something, and they wonder why we are so feckless so often.

They are probably shaking their heads. What are these other people talking about that somebody else should make the rules that we live under?

The REINS Act would require congressional approval for regulations that have a major impact on our economy of more than $100 million, or lead to a raise in consumer prices, or adversely affect employment.

If the REINS Act becomes law, every major regulation promulgated by the administration will come back to Congress for our approval. These regulations, they are not just regulations, these have the force of law. You can go to prison for 10 years, as we have seen with the regulation on pistol braces, just because some bureaucrat decided they wanted to pass a regulation.

In fact, the jobs-crushing OSHA vaccine mandate was one of the things that we should have voted on. If you are going to do that to your constituents, vote on it. But we didn't. We let the executive branch do it.

The idea behind the REINS Act isn't novel. It is enshrined in the Constitution. Article I, Section 1 of the U.S. 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.''

Does it say and a bureaucracy? No, it doesn't. Does is it say some legislative powers herein granted? No, it says all legislative powers herein granted are given to the Congress of the United States.

Congress has delegated its authority to unaccountable Federal agencies over the past decades, and our constituents are feeling that burden. Unelected bureaucrats do not have the constitutional authority to write laws, nor are they accountable to the people. They are career bureaucrats.

Our Congress has this power, and ceding it to the Federal agencies undermines our representative form of government.

Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. McCormick), my good friend.

Mr. Speaker, one of the arguments made from the other side of the aisle that I find absolutely laughable is this notion that the REINS Act might be unconstitutional, might have some constitutional infirmity because it requires Congress to pass the laws instead of the executive branch.

They reference a Supreme Court decision, INS v. Chadha, that doesn't even read on this bill. The REINS Act does not violate the Presentment Clause because it requires passage in the House, passage in the Senate, and a signature of the President. It doesn't even apply to the Supreme Court decision that was referenced.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Roy), my good friend.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to include in the Record a document titled: ``Gas stove use and respiratory health among adults with asthma in NHANES III,'' the conclusion of which is: ``Among adults with asthma, there was no apparent impact of gas stove use on pulmonary function or respiratory symptoms.''

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to tell the story of how the REINS Act originated. It is one of the most popular bills in Congress. It is the one bill that would do the most to restore the constitutional balance of government.

It was an idea from Lloyd Rogers. Lloyd is a constituent of mine. He grew up in an orphanage where he met the girl who would later become his wife. They were married for 65 years.

Lloyd served during the Korean war. Lloyd came home and ran for county judge executive, where he served the people of Kentucky once again. Time after time, when he was trying to do the right thing for the people in Kentucky, he was frustrated by laws, but he dug into them. They weren't laws. They were rules, and he couldn't talk to his Congressman to get these things fixed so that he could govern locally.

He came up with the idea of the REINS Act, gave it to the Congressman who represented the district before me, and then that Congressman brought it here to Congress. That is the way laws are supposed to happen, not by some bureaucrat.

Mr. Speaker, I want to move on to the gas stove act here. Despite media gaslighting to the contrary, the Biden administration has effectively declared war on gas stoves using varying rationales.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Langworthy), my good friend.

Mr. Speaker, the other side of the aisle has said that nobody's gas stove is going to be banned. Let me read you a statement from Jeremy Ortiz, a spokesperson for the Department of Energy: Our ``analysis is constructed so that the proposed standard would ensure that products with at least one HIR burner and continuous grates can continue to be available on the market.'' Here is the punch line: ``We did go out of our way to make sure that these two features would remain on the market in creating our analysis. Over half the market would remain if this standard is finalized as proposed.''

Wow. They went out of their way. They bent over backward to make sure they were only going to ban half of the gas stoves on the market for now.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 5 minutes to the gentlewoman from Florida (Mrs. Cammack).

Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Make no mistake: This administration wants to ban gas stoves. They have said it out loud.

Mr. Speaker, 38 to 40 percent of Americans use gas stoves. I asked the ranking member of the committee of jurisdiction for these bills to save our gas stoves if he owns a gas stove. In fact, he does. I asked him: Does it meet the new standards? Would he be able to buy one in the market? He has no idea. He was offended that I would ask such a question.

We have two bills here to protect your gas stoves: The Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act and the Save Our Gas Stoves Act.

The Federal Interagency Committee on Indoor Air Quality has never identified gas cooking stoves as contributing to asthma or respiratory illness, nor has the Consumer Product Safety Commission nor the EPA ever identified gas stoves as a significant contributor to adverse air quality or as a health hazard.

The other side of the aisle just doesn't like gas stoves. They are reaching for any reason to ban these things. They shouldn't. It is shortsighted.

Number one, what if everybody had an electric stove, how would they get the energy? Well, you would burn natural gas, as many States do-- most States do--in a turbine; you would generate electricity in a process that is hardly 50 percent efficient; then you would transmit it over power lines to the household, which could be hundreds of miles, at an efficiency of maybe 70 percent by the time it goes through all of the transformers, gets to the house, and then heats up the pot.

Why not take the natural gas to the house and burn it there directly?

Many consumers have identified that this is a lot more efficient, and that is what they do and that is why they have gas stoves. They are 3.4 times more affordable than electric stoves. Those who use gas for heating, cooking, and clothes drying on average save over $1,000 a year in their household. When the electricity goes out, when you have natural disasters, natural gas is there and usually available to offer lifesaving heat and to boil water.

I spent about 3 hours yesterday delving into the Department of Energy's regulations and their scientific basis for what they are doing because I wanted to know: How can one appliance that burns gas be more efficient than another appliance that burns gas?

If you expose CH4 in the presence of oxygen, you get a certain amount of Btus. Unless you have got some science project with a catalyst, you are going to get the same number of Btus from both stoves.

When I dug into it, here is what they want to do. They measured efficiency by heating up a pot of water, and they found that stoves with heavy grates or continuous grates that allow for more safety, they said those are less efficient because the grate heats up and less of your energy goes into your water.

Mr. Speaker, people aren't cooking water. They are cooking food. Those grates provide more heat as the food sits there on the stove. The continuous grates provide safety for somebody who is not strong enough to pick up a pan, yet they are saying those are less efficient.

Then in their studies, if you dig deep enough, they admit that a dogged pursuit of efficiency will result in stoves that are less healthy, because to make it more efficient, you shorten the grates and get the pan closer to the flame.

When the flame impinges on the pan, the gas doesn't combust efficiently, and you get carbon monoxide. If all you care about is efficiency, you get more carbon monoxide.

What are they doing? They are going after the high-end stoves. That is where they are going first, the ones with the heavy grates, the ones with the thick walls in the ovens that make it easier to cook good food. They are saying they are less efficient, but they are heating up water. They are not cooking food. They are making assumptions about customer preferences.

In the realm of electric stoves, they say: Induction stoves are more efficient. So we will just make everybody buy new pans because all of your pans don't work on induction stoves. So what, says the Department of Energy.

This is a war on stoves, and the war will be undone or stopped, halted, by the Gas Stove Protection and Freedom Act and the Save Our Gas Stoves Act.

I want to finish by talking about another bill in this rule, which is to restore the separation of powers. It is pretty simple. This bill is two pages long, and it is basically a legislative repeal of Chevron deference.

Chevron deference may go away soon anyway because it is based on a Supreme Court decision that said: Do you know what? If a regulatory agency does their best and makes a good guess about what they think the law is, then the court shouldn't second-guess the regulatory agency.

That is not the court's job. The court's job is to look at the law as written by Congress, not to say: Stretch it as far as you want, administrative branch.

The Separation of Powers Restoration Act would require the courts to look at all questions of law de novo, including interpretation of constitutional and statutory provisions.

Mr. Speaker, this is a wise bill. It should pass, and the rule for this should pass.

I also want to note, just in closing, that the American people don't understand why my colleagues want to give up power to the executive branch. They elected us to come up here and represent them, to live by the laws that we write, but also to be responsible for those laws when our constituents have to live under them.

It sounds absurd to the American people that we would want to give up that power that those people have entrusted to us.

Whether laws or the structure of government, if my colleagues just follow common sense, they know banning gas stoves isn't going to save the planet. It is going to increase prices. It is going to make it harder for low-income and middle-income families to get by if they have to buy more expensive appliances or if they have to cook their food longer. That is the result of these regulations.

All of that could be reined in with the REINS Act. That is what we need to do. We need to pass this resolution today and get these four bills on the floor. We have allowed amendments, and everybody under this rule has had 72 hours to read the bill. What a concept. Give the American people the time to read the bill, as well. We have read it. We know what these bills do. Put them on the floor.

Mr. Speaker, I urge a ``yes'' vote on all four bills and, most explicitly, a ``yes'' vote on this resolution.

Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time, and I move the previous question on the resolution.