On the recordFebruary 10, 2011
In closing, I find some degree of irony in the gentleman's comments that anybody saying that we need to do away with regulation was stupid, because the President of the United States stood in this Chamber last month and was citing specific regulations that were redundant or were inappropriate. The resolution that we have been debating tonight is a critical step toward restoring our economy and getting Americans back to work. I would like to point some context out on this. I think we have 100 percent agreement in the Chamber tonight that we want clean water and we want clean air. I'm the father of an asthmatic child, two asthmatic children, I might add, who has been up all night and made the trips to the ER and understands this. But there's a significant difference between the context of application there and dealing with some of the changes and the moving standards in the regulatory community that have huge economic impact on our communities. I would like to cite three brief examples of different contexts of regulations that need to be modernized or changed, or have lost their context. Again, we are not talking about an anti-regulation issue here. The fact is that regulations have never been aggressively attacked. What happens is we layer another regulation on top of an existing regulation. We increase the complexity of that. We create new organizations that do the same thing, costing more money, creating uncertainty.
