I think it's more the ``reins'' you use in Texas to pull back on that bull or that horse that's getting away. It's appropriate to Kentucky, too, with our equine culture as well. I appreciate the gentleman for yielding. To your point, when…
I think it's more the ``reins'' you use in Texas to pull back on that bull or that horse that's getting away. It's appropriate to Kentucky, too, with our equine culture as well.
I appreciate the gentleman for yielding.
To your point, when we talk about bills, like the health care bill that was forced through last year that has so many new rules that are going to be propagated over time and the challenges that we're facing with an increasing complexity of government, all of these rules are placing a burden on the consumer and are leaving virtually no recourse for voters and no recourse for our communities. The operationalized term would be ``unfunded mandates,'' but I think what we really have to come down to is looking at this as costs that are being levied that affect every area of our lives.
The last, probably, five or six administrations have seen a tremendous amount of growth in the amount of regulations. As you mentioned, over 3,000 new rules and regulations were queued up last year. This is a real concern that affects all of us. If we think about education and the challenges that our schools have today, with regard to No Child Left Behind, which was a well-intended bill in terms of goals of improving student performance, when that law was written into enough compromising or overly general language to be thrown over the wall to the Department of Education, the detailed implementing of regulations moved to place a massive unfunded mandate on the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which is for disabled children or for children who fall into that category.
It was supposed to be funded at 40 percent of the expected level. It has never gotten above 12 percent in any school district in Kentucky, in my congressional district. Those funds have to be reallocated from elsewhere; and in order to comply federally, we are seeing schools lay off teachers, cancel PE programs, and cancel other programs that are deemed nonessential for Federal compliance. This doesn't help our students. It doesn't help those the law was intended to help.
When we think about the EPA, certainly we can talk about greenhouse gas regulation. There is a case where there is a move on the part of the executive branch--regardless of whether a person is Democrat, Republican, Libertarian or an independent, the Constitution mandated that the legislature, both Houses of Congress, had power of the purse and the power to hold the executive branch accountable. The executive branch was to execute the laws, not make the laws.
When there was a Democratic supermajority in the House and in the Senate, what we were seeing was cap-and-trade, an energy taxation. The production of energy in this country was not able to be accomplished because there were not functional majorities in either Chamber for the President to sign a bill, which he said in his own campaign would necessarily cause utility rates to skyrocket.
Now we hear the announcement, well, we're going to go ahead and do this anyway. Then it comes home full circle in a way that has hit almost every community in the country in one way or another, and that's the issue of EPA compliance with stormwater or drainage mandates.
Again, these could be well intended, but we have to look at the regulations in context, what they want to achieve. In my own area of Boone, Kenton, and Campbell Counties, in my first year in Congress-- and, actually, I'd been in Congress for about 2 months--the EPA imposed a consent decree on three Kentucky counties for $800 million, in effect an $800 million tax on one water and sewer district for these upgrades which, frankly, in most cases across our communities were entirely unnecessary at a standard way beyond what reality was and one that imposed a huge, huge burden on working families and on the poor.
This bothered me for years. We looked at different ways to deal with that. The Congressional Review Act was a good attempt, but the challenge that we've had with the CRA is that it has only worked one time to repeal a regulation. That was the Clinton era ergonomics rule. In that case, all the
stars lined up. We had a House that could pass it, a Senate that could pass it, and a President who was willing to sign the repeal of this regulation from a prior administration.
I want to come back to the constitutional point because here you have working families and, in fact, towns in my district where the compliance cost with the stormwater decree are actually more, in some cases, than the actual revenues of the budgets of the towns. We went back and forth with different ideas; and in August of 2009, a constituent of mine came into my office as we were working through different ways to look at reducing and relieving the regulatory burden on businesses, on citizens. Let's have regulations in the context of their costs and also one with scale.
This gentleman said to me, How come you all can't vote on these things?
The light bulb went on. We went back to work, approaching it in different ways and came up with the REINS Act. It stands for the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act. In the last Congress, it was H.R. 3765.
We started with the simple premise of major rules that have an economic impact of $100 million or more cumulatively. Once the 60-day comment period is over, instead of being enforced upon a particular constituency, as they are today with very little interaction with industry and, frankly, with very little heeding of industry in the comment areas or in our communities--for example, for things like that stormwater bill, for things like No Child Left Behind, for things like net neutrality, for things like doing Card Check by regulation versus, again, going against the will of the people's elected representatives-- what that would do is, before enforcement, force that rule back up to Capitol Hill under a joint resolution.
It's constitutional. It would have to pass in the House, pass in the Senate, and then go to the President's desk for signature. And what that would do is be able to give people back in the United States-- Washington, D.C. was one time described as a 10-mile by 10-mile square surrounded by reality. Back in the world real, where our taxpayers live, where the jobs are created, they would now have people to hold accountable, the men in the House and the Senate, if these large rules that are imposing such significant economic burdens were imposed upon them.
So, as we moved forward, got a tremendous amount of support for that across the business community, across the legal community, citizens; and, frankly, local governments have lauded this, and we're looking forward to moving that forward. There was so much momentum that we had at the end of the last Congress that this was put into the Pledge to America and was reintroduced.
Let me back up, Senator Jim DeMint introduced the Senate version of this intact; and then in the new Congress, we reintroduced a slightly improved version of the legislation in the House, and the identical bill was introduced by our new junior Senator from Kentucky, Rand Paul, with 23 additional Senate cosponsors. We're up to 134 cosponsors in the House of this bill and have had two hearings in the Judiciary Committee about it where this discussion on ultimate accountability is there.
Before I yield back in this portion, the one thing I would share with you also is this is not a partisan bill. The opponents of the bill have tried to say it is anti-regulation or it is an attempt to go after the administration. It is not that at all. In the Bush administration, in the Clinton administration, in the Reagan administration, in the Carter administration--we can keep going on back--finding rules and regulations that were implemented outside what the original intent of the Congress had been. You know, in the past we could work around these rules and regulations. Economically, now, things are so tight and so tough we cannot afford to burden the competitiveness of our businesses any longer.
When we come back, I'll give you some examples of that that will personalize this to an additional degree, but I'm really glad you're holding this hour tonight to discuss the critical impact of regulations, a cost that's approaching $2 trillion a year on the American economy. Frankly, the cost of regulation is substantially more than the annual tax revenue that is collected by the government.
I thank you, Judge Carter. The real question when it comes down to Presidential support of this, Presidents regardless of party don't tend to want to relinquish party, but I think from a constitutional prerogative there is so much importance in changing the dialogue, the dialogue between the House and Senate on Capitol Hill, but also the dialogue between the executive branch and the legislative branch.
To this point, the thing that I would share, President Obama during his campaign called for a post-partisan area, and that as soon as his legislative agenda did not pass, he moved to want to implement everything by regulation that could not get through the House and the Senate.
The reality is, to get to the post-partisan era and to restore balance between Congress and the executive branch is to pass a bill like this. A senior EPA executive, who has to remain nameless because of who this person shared with me, he thought a concept like REINS was a great idea for two reasons, not from a partisan perspective--and this is somebody in an agency that's regulated.
And the first thing that he shared with me was his unutterable frustration that the Congress often sends overly generic or nonspecific or, in fact, many times contradictory titles in bills, health care being a specific example of that, where it is so difficult for the regulators to try to determine what the intent of Congress was. Oftentimes in order to get that interpretation, they come out with something entirely against the intent of what people wanted who were supporting the bill.
The other thing that happens in that same vein is legislation is often crafted to get a majority of votes in each Chamber and to get a conference acceptance between the House and Senate with language that creates holes, that creates opportunity for the executive branch to legislate or tax by regulation versus working through the regular order of the House and the Senate. To me, that's not constitutional.
I am not an attorney, but the one thing I can say is the Constitution reads pretty clearly on who is supposed to legislate. And I believe that, frankly, Congress has abdicated, in the past, its responsibility to maintain that control because it was easier, usually in a crisis. This really began in earnest during the Depression. Growth in the regulations related to national security began during the Cold War. We have seen the Great Society programs where many other agencies began to grow, and it affects us in a huge number of ways.
The second reason that the gentleman was supportive of a concept like the REINS Act was this: that it would force a dialogue for clarity between the agency that would have to implement regulations under rules that were being written in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, it would force that dialogue to make sure that the intent of Congress is clear. Instead of having 2,700-page bills that show up hours before a vote, the dialogue could be ongoing, reduced down to a concise piece of legislation that had very clear intent, very clear expectations and metrics, and a clear outcome to maintain context for our citizens.
I would like to touch on a couple of these that affect all citizens. The first one, people like to have their privacy protected. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act in the late 1990s that was enacted into law was intended to protect patient privacy. It was intended to make sure that people's most intimate information would not be freely available outside of very legitimate and necessary venues or where that person gave permission. That law, known euphemistically as HIPAA by its acronym, has accomplished vastly more than the original intent of the law, and mostly damage.
I can give you an example. I was doing what is called a mini internship at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center in northern Kentucky the week that HIPAA implemented. And I watched in the space of that time-- the internship was an opportunity for people in the business community to come in and learn more about how the health care infrastructure works, business practices that are being implemented. It fosters a dialogue between health care professionals. HIPAA ended that because of liability concerns. Just simple interaction that had taken place before.
More importantly than that, every doctor's office that I had visited, every department of the hospital suddenly saw their paperwork overnight double in dealing with the same patients with the same procedures. So the cost of actually getting the treatment prepared was, in effect, doubled.
We are seeing nurses no longer do nursing, and it's now the patient care assistants. We are seeing doctors no longer doing medicine--it's charge nurses and senior nurses on units--because, again, the amount of documentation that is required in order to cover the bases on this rule have had an impact far out of proportion to the original intent of simple privacy protection that could have been accomplished in other ways had Congress been more clear.
On transportation, there is always interest in discussion. As you well know, coming from Texas, Texas is different from Kentucky, is different from New York, and everybody is different from California as trendsetters. We all have uniquenesses in this Nation. It's what makes America great. In my part of Boone County, Kentucky, where I live, we experienced a tremendous amount of growth: from one tiny subdivision to nine subdivisions; a new elementary school; commerce that was going up and down Highway 237, known as North Bend Road, a little two-lane road that would snake and curve up to the most northern part of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
Well, originally in our 6-year road plan, it was supposed to be a four-lane highway that was going to be built to support all of this new traffic. However, some of the new transportation rules got in place about green space and bike paths, and this is what we got at the end of the day. After tens of millions of dollars, 2\1/2\ years of construction work, what we got was a beautiful two-lane highway with bike paths and green space in between where a public safety vehicle can't be turned around, and two traffic circles. Now the traffic is just as bad as it was before all of these millions and millions of dollars were spent in order to comply with Federal regulations.
To me, things like that don't even need to be levied at the Federal level. That can be decided at the State or a community level if we want to do things like bike paths, if we want to do things like traffic circles, if you want to place green space in the middle of that road to use Federal transportation dollars that are appropriated to the State.
Another example that comes to mind, a place that I dropped off some suits and shirts this morning--or, actually, my wife did after I came to Washington, D.C. early this morning. Nick Bell is an entrepreneur in Boone County, Kentucky. Years ago, he started a dry cleaners, known as Braxton's Dry Cleaners, with some friends. They have top-notch customer service. They go out of their way to grow their business.
In the late 1990s, Nick had a vision to expand. His service was so effective and the quality of care he gave his customers was so good that he grew to a point where he had more business than his current physical plant could handle in this small dry cleaner. So he did what any enterprising entrepreneur would do: He pooled his savings, the
company revenues, and decided to install an additional dry cleaning machine.
He suddenly found out--this was his first real encounter with the regulatory state from the time that he had started his business--that the clean water rules had changed after 1996, and he was under a whole new set of mandates. Nick was informed that he was going to have to do about 18 boreholes into the concrete pad of his little dry cleaner to test for potential carcinogens. Dry cleaning fluid was listed a potential carcinogen. A potential, I might add. In fact, one oncologist told me that you would basically have to drink gallons of the stuff on a daily basis in order to induce the pH level or the toxicity level in your body to cause cancer to grow. But nonetheless, the rule was the rule. The environmental inspector came out to his facility. He did the 18 boreholes and paid the additional money for that, and then an interesting thing happened.
On one of those boreholes, they discovered one teaspoon of groundwater underneath the concrete pad of this business, which created numerous jobs for our county. In that teaspoon of water was several parts per million of dry cleaning fluid that had apparently been spilled on the floor and had leaked through a small fissure. To you and me, we wouldn't think twice about that if we spilled some windshield wiper fluid or something on our driveway. We would clean it up and we would move on. Or maybe some paint falls off of a windowsill that we're painting on the outside of our house. Nick was informed immediately that he was going to have to remediate that teaspoon of water. He said, Well, sir, I can't afford that. I just won't install the dry cleaning machine. Then the full encounter with the regulatory state came into being. He was told, No, if you don't remediate it to the standard, we are going to shut down your business.
There was no environmental risk. There was no true remediation risk. I am speaking as an engineer. There was just no risk. What was at risk were the jobs of the people there, the clothing of the folks that were trapped in there. And what Mr. Bell had to pay was $60,000 in remediation fees for one teaspoon of water. It might have been different if Dow Chemical had a major spill, but this is a dry cleaner in Boone County, Kentucky. It had a great impact. It made him an activist, among other things. These examples are rife.
I live in the longest river district in the United States, along the Ohio River. We have a lot of flooding today that is going on. People can't pick up the trash that comes up on their properties, on the riverbanks. You know why? Very simple. Under the rules that are laid forth in implementing the legislation under the Clean Water Act and under the Corps of Engineers, if you reach down and take hold of any of that detritus that washes up on your land, you own that for liability purposes and are responsible for all the remediation costs of whatever that might be. Hence, as you go in businesses up and down our inland waterways, you will find all of this garbage, all of this waste that has washed up because, by our own laws, the people who want to clean it up free of charge to the Federal Government with no overhead to the State or local communities--think of the Boy Scouts who want to go out on a weekend--they're stopped from doing this and will not do it.
And finally, the last point that I would make on this: We talk about the issues of clean water. I care about clean water. I want to see our water clean, our water pure, but we need to take a look at what standards are again in context.
An enterprising new county judge executive in Lewis County, Kentucky, Thomas Massie, a brilliant MIT graduate who has patented many technology devices, came back home to settle down, to bring these practices back home, and he is an expert in sustainable energy. We are from a coal State, and he wants to do something that is tremendously innovative. He wants to build in this county that doesn't have inherent natural resources but is along a long section of the river, to wall up some of the large draws, with the large hills that come down to the river's edge, and to create, in effect, a hydroelectric generating capability with two large reservoirs.
The proposition was simple: to fill them with water from the Ohio River, and then they could naturally be drained or refilled based on need, based on precipitation and evaporation. But it would be largely sustaining and could generate enough electricity for several counties around the area.
Guess what the new judge ran into? The Environmental Protection Agency, because the clean water standard says that if I take one gallon of water out of the Ohio River, I cannot put a gallon of Ohio River water back into the Ohio River unless it is purer than drinking water.
This is an issue that's completely out of context. And this is part of the challenge I think that we face, that many citizens don't realize as we encounter this regulatory culture, that these are the rules that hit the pocketbooks of people.
It's not simply an issue of big business. It's working families, the elderly, the working poor, our farmers, our small businesses who create jobs are all effected by the $2 trillion in regulations. And ultimately, if we are going to compete in a global environment, it's not that we want to stop regulation, but we need to bring it into context and make it concise, make sure there is real impact and something that, at the end of the day, doesn't prevent us from creating jobs and doesn't prevent us from competing and keeping our country strong in the 21st century.
I thank the gentleman. And just your point on being responsible. One thing that I would share along these lines is that one of the jobs that all Members of Congress have is to explain to their constituents what is happening in Washington and also to explain to Washington what their constituents think. And when we come down to these issues with the rules, I think of one thing so critical for us to understand is, and I have seen it in my early time here. I saw it certainly during the health care debate when people would walk out and they would do press conferences and do press releases talking about all the great things that were happening. We read the bill in our office, I didn't see any of that happening, but it took 3 months and then 6 months and 12 months, and people were waking up to all these things that weren't there, and it created a great backlash. And much of that was expressed in frustration at the election because of ultimately this growth and intrusion of policy that the American people didn't want.
By having this check and balance, it does several things. It restores transparency so people can see. It forces Members of Congress to communicate with their district. If we think a regulation is something that is important to have enacted or a law that will empower a regulation that is going to have significant reach, we need to have that discussion with our constituents so they understand, as well as a discussion with the agency community long before that legislation ever goes to the floor of the House.
By bringing about this REINS process, it would take these major rules at the end of 60 days back up here for an up-or-down vote. Really, if the House and Senate are doing their job and the agency community and the executive branch is doing its job, that should be a relatively straightforward exercise. But if there is an attempt by the executive to step outside the will of the people, then we get into this. And it is important.
I go back to the question of the Congressional Review Act. In corollary, not directly tied to this by regulation, but oftentimes in the agencies there is an attempt that takes place to fall into a routine of operation. And in times of crisis, those are not always the most effective thing.
Many of us remember back in the early days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Regardless of one's politics, positions on the policy, we suddenly found ourselves in a new kind of counterinsurgency that had not been expected by the military, had not had the expectation set by the administration that this was going to unfold, and in fact they were caught by surprise. Because of the promulgation of thousands of improvised explosive devices by the fall of 2003, the Army and Marine Corps specifically realized we were in a full-blown counterinsurgency and had to
react. The first words out of the civilian bureaucracy and the Defense Department were that it would take several years in order to accomplish what was necessary because laws would have to be enacted and following test doctrines for various programs.
I think of some of the things I have seen in military programs that began 15, 20, 25 years ago and simply die because, by the time something gets to a flyable prototype or an executable weapons system, it ends up making itself obsolete because there is not that agility to respond because of the internal regulations, not even germane to what we are talking about tonight, but these rules that govern the mindset of how the government operates.
Well, telling division commanders and brigade commanders and regimental and battalion and company commanders, well, it will be a couple years down the road, and we will have a solution to your immediate combat problem, is not the way Americans think and operate.
In World War II, we fielded all kinds of technology. What worked was made in mass, and it showed the agility of our industrial complex. And we were looking for everything, long before this large military- industrial bureaucracy came into being.
What it took for Congress to get the up-armored vehicle program into theater, and it was an amazing thing after enactment; you were here to see that, 39,000 armored vehicles that would not have gone into theater specifically in Iraq were there in 16 months, but it took an act of Congress to do that, to exert on the executive branch the will of the American people. This was even a case when the President agreed and wanted this, but even he couldn't overcome the inertia of his own agency community. Something not uncommon for Presidents, regardless of party.
Coming back into our world here with the regulations that affect us economically in day-to-day time. Restoring accountability, restoring the dialogue, restoring the constitutional primacy of the legislature allows us to do our job to protect the American people, to make sure that their interests are seen, and give them somebody to hold accountable at the end of the day. You can't fire the EPA administrator or the director of the FCC or the Secretary of Education or any of a number of other agency heads if they implement regulations that are not what our communities, what our country, what our citizens want. And, frankly, it brings an end to this paternalistic government that is run by experts that don't necessarily reflect what the will of the American people is.
Your colleague from Texas gave a remarkable speech a couple of years ago on the issue of CFC light bulbs. I find it so amazing in the mandate that was put down to have CFC light bulbs. In 2007, I remember when one was dropped in the Longworth Office Building and the building was evacuated over the issue of this. Mr. Poe from Texas read this draconian list of regulatory requirements in dealing with a dropped light bulb.
The thing that struck me is it is so expensive to comply with the regulations on the production side that none of them are made nor will ever be made in the United States of America. They are made in China. And I think that is one example that shows this complete dissonance.
We can restore American economic competitiveness. We can strengthen our regulatory framework for real, sound regulations that protect consumers, that protect the American people, that protect the integrity of our commerce, but do it in such a way so it is in context and not putting layer over layer over layer that just increases complexity, increases the size and reach of government, and ultimately the cost to our pocketbook.