James Lankford

So just to clarify on it, $100 million nationwide, so $2 million per State, added altogether in aggregate, that suddenly becomes an unfunded mandate.

So that one should come back to the legislative branch.

The application of it, though, will be interesting to see if it has political consequences with it as well.

At some point it gets absurd. But you can always say, but it will save it a life.

There will obviously be significant rules that will come out of those, many of them with millions of dollars of impact on the economy.

This is a piece of legislation that desperately needs repair, and I am sure we will have very robust conversations on the solutions to repair it.

I would like to be able to defer to Mr. Connolly, my ranking member, for 5 minutes of questions.

Right. Well, there is a significant challenge for a local municipality that the Department of Transportation says your street signs are not reflective enough, so you have to change all of your street signs.

But you would not suggest that we have a judicial review process or a legislative review that may come back over here, if there is a question that it comes back over for a legislative determination to say this was the legislation, the…

If I say that global warming is caused by manmade pollution, suddenly everything that we do that ever relates to global warming, it is we are saving the planet.

What are your thoughts on the private sector and regulations that are coming down on them, as well as the public sector?

How do we keep a group with so much authority and so little accountability from getting this tunnel vision that you talk about in your book?

But is that a waiver that needs to be done or is that something that needs to be established as a process to say regulation cannot go into effect until----

So it is down the hall, but it is still within the same agency.

But that is the challenge, because once you start getting into those assumptions and you start evaluating it, it is very difficult for me to be able to say let's hand that to an agency and if private industry or if the government, State…

It is my hope that we can also discern issues that must be addressed in a legislative solution to our unfunded mandates.

Ultimately on onerousness Congress has the final say.

It is not creating certainty in what prices are going to be, where they can invest and what they can do.

I can tell you in my State, for the energy companies in my State, they are struggling with EPA right now over 316(b).

It seems to me the market has driven this.

If there is any area that I can tell you from energy companies that I talk to and I interact with in my district, it is the sense of uncertainty.

We need to talk about future exploration.

We just don't do business as efficiently as we could because of integration.

Ultimately, at this point we have hardware, software, and management issues.

The President has been very good to just say, we don't want to do an end around Congress.