Thank you, Judge. It's good to be with you tonight working in common cause on this issue. So many of us have seen not simply in the last 2 years or the last 4 years, but a growth of government really over the last 50 years that is…
Thank you, Judge. It's good to be with you tonight working in common cause on this issue. So many of us have seen not simply in the last 2 years or the last 4 years, but a growth of government really over the last 50 years that is unprecedented, and it's increasing every year in size.
The intent behind the Congressional Review Act in 1996 was absolutely solid. But when it went into law, one of the challenges that happened was that law didn't really have the teeth in it to force accountability of the agency community with the Congress. And I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the things that led up to our introduction of the REINS Act, H.R. 3765, the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny Act. And it's a long name to really give the analogy of pulling back on this unbridled growth or
race to increase the size of the government.
The only time that the Congressional Review Act has been effectively used to block the implementation of a regulation was the ergonomics rule from the Clinton administration's Department of Labor that was going to be implemented in early 2001, and it was struck down by the incoming Congress and then signed into law by President Bush as one of his earliest legislative actions in 2001. Since that time of the Republican administration and a subsequent Democrat administration, we have seen an explosion of regulations. We can name virtually any agency in the Federal Government that on account of two reasons--one, a lack of congressional oversight and enforcement, where an agency can literally go out and move independent of the clear intent of Congress because of some of the nebulous language that's allowed to go into bills to get compromises to get it passed; and the second thing that happens in that, as well, is that these regulations get promulgated as a means of an administration in the executive branch to, in effect, subvert what the desire of the Congress is. We saw it in immigration policy. We've seen it in environmental policy, and we've seen it in aspects of defense policy. No Child Left Behind is filled with unfunded mandates that are placed upon local school systems. And the cumulative sum of this is a huge amount of the economy.
Compliance with regulation comes with a cost. There's a scoring system of rules, and what we chose to focus on was major rules, which I will get to in a minute, but a major rule is one that has a cumulative economic effect of $100 million a year. That is an awful lot of money. But when we look at a country of over 300 million people, we can get there very, very quickly.
Let me give you a personal example. For people who might be watching this broadcast tonight, I ask you this question: Has your sewer bill gone up or your water bill gone up in the last 5 years? The majority of communities in this country have seen a great increase due to a mandate, an unfunded mandate, from the Environmental Protection Agency for storm water compliance. Is environmental stewardship relevant? Absolutely. But here is the bigger question. I'll go to northern Kentucky, and this became the genesis of the REINS Act.
We had just at the peak, the tipping point of economic growth, about 5 years ago, a consent decree was negotiated in a draconian fashion where we dictated to the water district in northern Kentucky for the three counties where I live, in Boone, Kenton, and Campbell Counties. That consent decree to mandate a change in storm water runoff and how that was going to be handled in our cities in those three counties of our 24 counties was an $800 million unfunded mandate on three counties in Kentucky. It overnight doubled everybody's water and sewer bills. The sewer bills were the first thing that came.
The second thing that we saw, though, because we are one of the more prosperous parts of the State in terms of having a sustainable tax base and manufacturing industry, as painful and unpleasant as it was, if it were, in fact, the correct thing to do, there was a means to cope with that. But I have towns in my district, particularly in the rural areas and some of the poorer areas, areas where folks do not have the tax base, smaller cities that have a diminishing and aging population that are heavily centered on retirees where the cost of storm water compliance is actually more than the city budget, and there is absolutely no relief at all or context to be applied in these regulations.
I was very concerned about this and had spoken out on it, and a constituent came and talked to me. And he just asked this question. He said, How come you all can't vote on these regulations? And we went to work. We went back and looked at the original intent of the Congressional Review Act. And the more that our legislative staff and I studied that, what we began to see was it takes an action of the House and the Senate overwhelmingly to repeal that regulation.
I thought about this from my time in manufacturing and operations, learning how to build things. If we can create something the equivalent of a stoplight that will simply stop the process, that becomes the basis of this, and that was the genesis of what became the REINS Act.
There was no way for accountability to be given to the American people. When it's a faceless executive in an agency, when it's a department, a subdepartment within an agency that issues a regulation, comments are rarely carried out. As you noted earlier, we very rarely actually see those regulations briefed. It just comes in a thick congressional register of thousands of pages.
And here is the thing that came to mind when we looked at that idea of how to deal with this from a voting perspective. What my friend shared opened our eyes to do an amendment to the Congressional Review Act that would change the nature of it from Congress has the option to. As you know, our good friends in the Senate are somewhat slower than we are in being able to get things done. There are more abilities to throw a stumbling block in place. We decided just to take that same idea; let's create a mandated process that, in fact, will force these regulations to be vetted so the American people have somebody to hold accountable.
If the head of the EPA, for example, a regional director of the EPA came into my district in August and made a statement to the effect of, If we have to put you all out of business and you have to move to other parts of the country that have a policy that we think is more acceptable, then so be it; but there's no ability for them to, in effect, strike back at the ballot box, to express another opinion. And these are not people that disagree with the EPA as an agency or any other agency for that matter. It's a question of constitutional authority, and it should be vested here. The power of the purse is in the House of Representatives, and the financial impact of these regulations should be in the House as well.
And this is what we propose with REINS--to rein in the government when a regulation of this magnitude is proposed. What would happen is that at the end of the comment period, instead of being enforced unilaterally upon the American people or being in endless court or remediation fights, what would happen, very simply, is those bills or those regulations would come back here to Capitol Hill. We would have a stand-alone, up-or-down vote, a no-excuses vote where Members of Congress of all 435 districts would have to vote and be accountable back to their citizens for the decision they took. If we're going to have an $800 million increase in water and sewer bills, they would vote. If we're going to increase the unfunded mandates on our schools, there would be Members of Congress and of the Senate who would have had to take that vote. I think it would have a restraining factor, knowing that people had an out, that there was accountability.
This extends into so many areas with EPA rules and the multiple rules that you mentioned with health care and with the new financial regulations, I could go on ad nauseam, and the sum of this economically is devastating to our country and it moves us away from looking at ways to be more efficient.
I say put the stop in place. This bill will do that. The REINS Act, H.R. 3765, makes us all accountable to our citizens. The benefits of this are twofold. The first benefit is that this is nonpartisan. In the Bush administration, as some of us have talked about, we noticed regulations that were being brought about and implemented that were against the better interest of our economy, of our communities in many parts of the country. There wasn't an open and public debate to be able to address that. The thing that this would do is it would push power back to the legislature where it needs to be, stop the unbridled growth of the executive branch so voters would always have a say.
The second thing it would do, and we saw this with the health care bill, 2,700 pages, much of it nebulous language that was given to us midnight Friday before a Sunday vote on that bill, there was no way to fully vet the consequences of that. I believe what the REINS Act would do is take those rules and it would lead to more streamlined and crisp language and eloquent legislative language stated, and avoid the
ability of any outstanding agency to subvert the will of Congress.
I appreciate being part of this discussion tonight.
I would agree wholeheartedly with you. In fact, we can extend that almost into every area of small business. For those who have experience in manufacturing and in any number of business areas or construction that deal with the use of various chemicals, resins and compounds, there is a compliance requirement called Material Safety Data Sheets, MSDS compliance, which requires a very large amount of documentation in a business. We look at Portland cements, which are very large businesses that have these burdens placed upon them that are very high, but it's even in very small businesses.
In working with many manufacturing companies in my time before coming to Congress, in the 12 years before my coming to Congress, after I had left the Service, I saw that these regulations created an undue hidden tax on America's ability to compete. It's not the idea of being antiregulation. I think standards can be very good and
very helpful, but it's the point at which that compliance is mandated and the context of that.
A case in point, I think, that I saw that typified this more than anything else was the case with my dry cleaners that I had used for years before I ended up running for office. It's called Braxton's Cleaners. It was started by a couple of entrepreneurs who wanted to build this business. They built it. It grew. They had very high quality customer service. Like all of us who have started small businesses, we've encountered the issue of how to deal with all of the hidden costs that come with just running any kind of small business.
Well, they hit a point where they were doing so much business--they were starting some satellite operations--that the owner decided that he would install another dry cleaning machine. He suddenly found out that, by wanting to do that, he had an EPA mandate through the State environmental cabinet of the Commonwealth of Kentucky that he had to have boreholes drilled through his floor to see if dry cleaning fluid in any capacity had gotten into the groundwater.
The standard that had been levied by the Environmental Protection Agency--and this is going back to actually 1999--for the amount of particulate matter of dry cleaning fluid--and essentially you and I could drink it. It would be awful stuff and probably make us sick, but it's not going to kill us--has been listed with many other chemicals as a possible carcinogen. You would have to pump this into somebody's body to create a real health issue, but it was so few parts per million that it was actually a higher standard than drinking water is in our county, which is maintained at a very high standard.
When this was found--and they found one teaspoon of water under the concrete pad at Braxton's Cleaners in Burlington, Kentucky--the inspector said, Well, you're going to have to remediate this.
His response was, Well, I don't have the money to do that.
Then the inspector said, You don't understand. We're going to shut you down if you don't do this.
So he spent over $50,000, in effect, to tear up the floor and to clean up one teaspoon of water.
The context issue here is that this is not Dow Chemical pumping out millions and millions of gallons of highly toxic chemicals. This is the local dry cleaner. I've had friends who were auto mechanics, running small garages, who built businesses, and who were successful entrepreneurs--taxpayers--creating jobs and growing. They've run into the same kinds of issues that lose context when they're complying and seeking to fulfill the intent of the law.
Before I yield back, I'll mention one other. I see the egregious example of regulatory intrusion. The purpose, for example, of the Transportation Security Administration is to provide security for the traveling public. That's the premise. I sat in here on October 31, 2001, as a candidate for Congress, during the anthrax scare, and I watched Norman Mineta--former Clinton administration Secretary of Transportation, who stayed over into the Bush administration--pleading as the father of two airline pilots not to implement the processes the way the TSA was going to. He said it would create an onerous cost, that it would create an excessive economic burden on the airline industry and that it wouldn't materially change the outcome of security. He advocated the use of a much more principle-based and systemic method used by the Israelis, which involves questioning and which gets the bags before they ever go into the airport.
Now we find a situation where I believe, personally, we're getting into some Fourth Amendment grounds, not as an attorney because I'm not one, but by questioning the need for these intrusive searches of everybody within the traveling public when, in fact, threats have already penetrated a secure area. The bigger question when I see the nun here and when I saw the video of the----
With that visual, keep in mind I've spent the last 26 years of my life traveling in and out of the Middle East in various capacities--serving there in the military and being in and out of the region, traveling on business, and now as a Member of Congress. I've had a chance to watch a system that is virtually flawless, and it's based on a series of questions that is not intrusive. It's a free society. They've maintained their civil liberties with a dramatically higher threat to terrorism.
Yet what we have done, if we look at this, is create the bureaucratization of security. We're not going to deal with the root cause issues; we're going to treat the symptoms. Nobody will ever take down an airplane with a box cutter or a pocketknife the way the hijackers did on 9/11. Now that citizens who are flying know, there have been multiple instances in flight where people have had erratic behavior, mainly trying to get to the lavatory, and they were tackled by passengers out of concern for this. Americans will fight back.
The situation has changed, and in effect, we're fighting the last battle; we're fighting the last terrorist attack as opposed to something like the Israeli system, which really incurs virtually no cost and manages to keep a very robust flying public that's very safe, and it all begins with asking questions.
People bring up the argument, Oh, well, you can't do that because that's profiling.
I would disagree with the misuse and misunderstanding of that term related to the cost. We are driving people away from traveling right now because of these intrusions. It's creating a huge burden on the flying public, and it's entirely unnecessary because it's checking innocent people, and 99 percent of our capacity is devoted to checking people for a threat that any trained security inspector would know is not even there. That's a poor use of assets.
I'll go back to the Israeli system. I was traveling out of Israel, alone, with a backpack, 17 years ago, on a short trip that I had had to make into Jerusalem. At the time, because of what I did and because of where I had been in the military, I had had lots of stamps from countries all over that area--some areas which weren't particularly friendly to Israel. I was asked questions--a blue-eyed, Caucasian male, from the United States, who spoke with an Ohio Valley accent. They began asking me a series of questions.
They looked at the passport stamps and moved me over and said, We'd like you to talk to this person over here.
The other 200-plus people who were going on that L-1011 Delta flight, in fact, were moved right on through. I was asked questions for over an hour and a half. There was no cost to those other people. The airline was able to do what they did, and they were able to very quickly verify that I was, A, no threat and a legitimate customer. That system works, and it works today, and it's almost impossible for somebody to fool that system.
The other thing that's important is we don't need these billions of dollars spent on these scanners that are being overused. Again, it comes down to situation awareness. We can address this issue with a lower cost by stepping back and applying what you and Congressman Westmoreland have been talking about tonight, which is just bringing some common sense to this.
What is the problem we really want to solve? Give us the most flexibility and the most options to deal with this after the fact.
Again, before regulations like this should be implemented, I believe we need to have a vote of Congress. Let the will of the people be made known in this rather than just simply giving away another set of our liberties without asking that question when, in fact, it comes at a significant cost. I think if our taxpayers who don't travel regularly understood the amount of money that we spend on hardware, which can still be penetrated by some type of a serious threat that was just outside that set of assumptions in TSA, we'd be in a different world.
This doesn't impugn the motivation of the folks in the Transportation Security Agency. I know there is an ongoing argument below the senior management levels of what works and what doesn't work, and it is by those who have lived in that world. They've lived in a high-threat environment and have been able to thrive.
I believe we can do that; but again, let's come back to these constitutional
underpinnings that regulations and rules that are going to govern the lives, the comings and goings and the commerce of all Americans should be decided here in House of Representatives, over in the Senate, and then signed by the President and not brought into being on the unilateral decision of one individual.
There are so many stories that we can think of, and it comes back to this issue of having context.
A very successful entrepreneur who actually started working in a coal mine at the age of 15, who is a very successful industry executive, made a comment to me when I first got elected to Congress that he wished that no person could run a Federal agency or serve in the House or the Senate unless they created one job so that they would know what it was like to deal with the consequences of regulations.
We come back and qualify this. The overall intent of the founding of some of these agencies was a very good thing, but let's step away from the EPA for a moment--we'll come back there in just a second--but move over to education.
We have some outstanding schools, blue ribbon schools in our region, and their increases in performance are not due to the mandates inside of the No Child Left Behind bill. In fact, I brought the Secretary of Education from the Bush administration, Dr. Margaret Spellings, to Kentucky in 2008. It took almost 9 months to get her there. Because I wanted her to be able to see as an educator--I'm the husband of a teacher and the father of a current school teacher--that the real key to success in education is not a regulatory mandate; it's again coming back to that context on the front lines.
In this case, I took her to two schools, one urban school and one rural school that had gone through dramatic turnarounds and that were both near the top of their state in their performance. And in each case it was a Back to the Future story. Reestablishing parental visitation, empowering teachers to bring families that might have some challenges literally into the community. Packing food backpacks for the weekend to make sure that kids in tough circumstances--having been a kid in a tough circumstance growing up, I appreciate what teachers did for me at the time.
And then we get down to the numbers. If we look at the impact of some of these regulations, when you have got an adequate performing or exceptionally well performing school system and then impose on that a mandate that requires a huge amount of paperwork and consumes hours of time, it detracts from the classroom. And then the promises under the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act, which--the intent of the law is good but the implementation is awful because the promise of 40 percent funding on an unfunded mandate in already strapped school systems, and the best--the average funding in Kentucky runs between 11 and 13 percent of that 40 percent.
So again, it's a tax by regulation that's imposed on local communities on an issue frankly I think should be controlled by the States and local communities.
I'll give you another case in our district of a very successful young man from Lewis County, Kentucky. He ran in the current wave of activism of people wanting to make a difference. To get elected county judge executive of Lewis County, Kentucky. They are in tough economic times. His name is Tom Massie. He was a stellar student at Lewis County High School. He went to MIT. Got a graduate degree. He invented some remarkable robotics technologies. Was very successful in business, and came back home to invest in his county--not monetarily but to make a difference and turn it around.
Energy is an issue not only in Texas and Kentucky. We're energy- producing states. We help to run--in effect our States are part of the engine of this Nation to help lay that foundation in the base of the economy.
Tom Massie came up with a brilliant idea that didn't involve coal or oil or nuclear power--all of which we should use and let the market work in this area--but he came up with an idea that would leverage the resources available in Lewis County because it has one of the longest stretches of the Ohio River of any county in Kentucky. We also have a lot of hills. You might call them mountains in Texas where you live. We call them hills and hollers where we're from.
And this MIT-trained engineer had a brilliant idea. And he took the equivalent of a dual-faced pump--and he had seen some examples done in other parts of the world--that would create a system of two lakes, and we have the Ohio River flowing in the front of this, one of the largest rivers in the country. And all it would take is channeling water, pumping it up to a lake on the top of the hill and creating in effect a self-replenishing hydroelectric generating system that would meet the hydroelectric needs for a good part of that multicounty area in addition to the current base.
It would create jobs. It would provide low-cost utilities so working families and the elderly and the poor would have access to electricity. It would be cheap. It would be an incentive for businesses to grow and for manufacturing to come into these areas because we wouldn't just do it there, we would do it all through the river basins of our Nation.
He found something out in his first impact with the regulatory framework that was done out of context. This brilliant idea that would have saved jobs and created jobs in Lewis County, Kentucky. He found out if they take water out of the Ohio River--which I must say is not one of the more pristine rivers of the country in terms of all of its accumulated detritus coming from the Allegheny and Monongahela, coming down from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois--the water, it would be considered dirty by our standards. But if he takes water out of the river if they have overflow from rain and wants to put it back in, the whole project was killed on one basis: That any water put back into the river had to be cleaner than drinking water under the current EPA standards.
This affects the energy industry. Coal produces almost 60 percent of power in this country. One of the issues is with stream mitigation and slurry runoff, which is a problem, but the operators of the coal mine who want to comply--and most do; they want to do the right thing. They also create jobs, and they create jobs that have an impact not simply in West Virginia, Kentucky, southern Ohio, in my part of the world. They also support jobs and manufacturing in New York and New Jersey and Pennsylvania because that electricity goes by wire to other parts of the country.
That basically creates the same standpoint. If an operator wants to clean part of the creek, the standard actually is for water that's cleaner than the water that already exists with the wildlife population that already might be there. It creates kind of an impossible situation--a double bind for anybody who wants to do business.
My request is, let's step back. Regulations like that need to be brought into context. And the place to do that is here. And I just appreciate you investing the time to make this difference, to bring this issue before the American people because it's a question of the-- the one saying I heard over and over through our election is we want to take back America. What's the taking back?
Really what we're talking about is restoring a constitutional balance that will allow and assure that the elected representatives and senators of the people will ultimately be accountable for any decisions made by the executive branch.
I appreciate a chance to participate in this debate and thank you for advocating so fiercely on this issue.