On the recordJanuary 4, 2017
My colleague from Tennessee has been a good friend on many issues. I know he is passionate about regulations and laws that he would like to have passed, and so am I. All of us in Congress have seen that it is extremely easy--the longer you are here, the more you will see it--it is extremely easy to stop something here. The same is true about those 61 or so regulations. Any combining of regulations, unless they are overwhelmingly disapproved, actually makes them harder to pass. We are not going to put 61 pieces of legislation, each of which has at least one or two or three or a dozen Republicans who vehemently oppose that regulation being rescinded. The fact is it is only the worst of the worst that are going to be stayed through this process and then reevaluated by the new administration. I will mention, though, for my colleagues on the other side of this debate today, that we do appropriations every year. The American people, and for the freshmen who haven't voted on appropriations yet, think of appropriations as somehow different than the law. It really isn't. Appropriation is simply a law that provides funding. Every appropriation bill during the entire nearly 8 years of President Obama has been some form of a continuing resolution or an omnibus. But as my colleague from Tennessee knows, every one of those has had dozens to hundreds of laws attached to them. We call them riders. We have terms for them.…
