Conservatives in Congress may have finally found a way to get around the filibuster threat that has thwarted their hopes of an extensive rollback of federal regulations.
The House Judiciary Committee last week advanced language based on the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act as part of the Republicans’ broader budget reconciliation package, Politico reported.
Republicans also are using an obscure law, the Congressional Review Act (CRA), to chip away at former President Joe Biden-era rules they say are hurting businesses and consumers, The New York Times reported.
The CRA allows lawmakers to reverse recently adopted federal regulations with a simple majority vote in both chambers.
The REINS Act has been passed in the House several times in recent years, but the threat of the Senate filibuster stopped the legislation each time.
“For those who say it would make a radical change, a radical departure from the status quo of rulemaking, I’d say, ‘Thank heaven above for that,'” Senate Energy and Natural Resources Chair Mike Lee, R-Utah.
Republicans in Congress have been trying for nearly a decade to implement wholesale regulation deletion. They now say they believe they’ve found ways to ensure the bill can gain Senate approval.
Lee, Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, Florida GOP Rep. Kat Cammack and other conservatives have met various times during the past year, holding “countless meetings, running hypothetical scenarios” to make the provision agreeable to the Senate parliamentarian, Cammack said.
“The trick with this is to get it through the Byrd bath,” Cammack said, referring to lawmakers’ shorthand for the reconciliation rules developed by the late Senate Democrat Majority Leader Robert Byrd.
“The House is its own animal,” Cammack said. “The Senate is subject to [other] tests … and so it really was just about rearranging the language to make it so that it could survive the Byrd tests.”
Cammack said she expected President Donald Trump to support the proposal.
“President Trump is one of the most aggressive regulatory reform advocates out there — if not the most,” she said. “I would say I’m pretty damn aggressive, but I’ll take No. 2 after President Trump.”
However, moderate Republicans could sink the bill.
Senate Republicans such as Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, declined to say whether they would back it.
The legislation in the GOP’s “one big, beautiful bill” would require any “major rule that increases revenue” to be approved via a joint resolution of the House and Senate before taking effect.
The proposal would allow lawmakers to retroactively terminate countless rules that federal agencies have already implemented by requiring them to submit them to Congress for review.
Congress also would be allowed to repeal a bunch of recently finalized regulations through the use of a single resolution. Currently, regulations need to be repealed individually.
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