Ted Poe: “I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, the fourth branch of government is the bureaucrats. We don't know who…”

“I thank the gentleman for yielding. Mr. Chairman, the fourth branch of government is the bureaucrats. We don't know who most of them are, but they are everywhere. And what they do is, with a certain group of bureaucrats, they regulate. Congress has allowed them to do that, by law, and they make all kinds of rules about everything. Usually they will take a law, and then they will regulate or form rules about that law; and because of that, we have about 175,000 pages of regulation. Come a long ways since the Ten Commandments--10 words, basically. Now they have got 175,000 pages of regulations, rules by Federal bureaucrats on American businesses and American individuals. Do we really need 175,000 rules? Maybe a few thousand less would be better. The SCRUB Act tries to organize all of these rules because a lot of them are important. A lot of them are good, and a lot of them are bad. A lot of them are dumb, and a whole lot of them are very expensive to Americans. Now, let's just use one example. The Lacey Act was written in about 1900, and the Lacey Act says, if a crime is committed in another country regarding importing into the U.S., it is a crime in the U.S. if it is a crime in another country.…”