On the recordJanuary 6, 2016
I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chairman, we are not proposing to hurt or kill babies, and we are not proposing to put handcuffs on certain regulators in the financial institutions. What we are asking for is to simply have a bipartisan group of people--bipartisan--look at regulations that may be outdated and scrub them. I think that is a reasonable expectation. That is not asking too much. It doesn't mean that every regulation is going to go away. There are some good regulations, but there are a lot of bad ones and there are a lot that are outdated. Things come into this institution, whether they come in through laws or they come from the executive branch. They never go away. A lot of them are unnecessary. The bill creates a bipartisan, impartial commission to conduct a comprehensive review of the Federal regulations system. The commission will identify out-of-date and expensive regulations. Independent agencies function very similarly, if not the same, as executive agencies, and the regulations impose significant costs on the economy. Unfortunately, independent agencies often impose major regulations without reporting any quantitative information on benefits and costs, which makes it even more important that those regulations be reviewed. Mr. Chairman, there is no need to distinguish independent and executive agencies in requiring the Federal agencies to clean up out- of-date and unnecessary regulations.…
