On the recordFebruary 11, 2011
I thank the chairman for yielding. Madam Speaker, the Nation is overregulated. You talk to any business owner, small or big, one of the first things they will talk to you about is the massive amount of Federal regulations that are imposed on them, many of them making no sense but costing them money. Of course, that cost is always transferred down to the consumer, the American citizen. I have tried to find out in the last few days how many regulations there are. Nobody knows. We can't find anybody in Washington that can give us an exact number of how many. One person that I trust said that there are over 300,000 Federal regulations that have punitive fines for failure to abide by that regulation. That's a lot of regulations. It seems to me--and this is just my opinion--that down the street where the bureaucrats work in those offices--and we don't know who those people are--they get up every morning; they go into a room; they sit around a big conference table, drink coffee, and they say, ``Who can we regulate today?'' And they write out another regulation and pass it down to the fruited plain and make the American citizen comply with that regulation. Some regulations are probably pretty good. Some probably are not so good. And it's our duty as representatives of the people to control and regulate the regulators. That is our job. I believe that is our constitutional requirement since we allow these agencies to exist in the administration.
