On the recordJuly 28, 2015
This amendment exempts from the bill any rule pertaining to health or public safety. Health and public safety regulation, done properly, serves important goals, and the bill does nothing to frustrate the effective achievement of those goals. But Federal health and public safety regulation constitutes an immense part of total Federal regulation and has been the source of many of the most abusive, unnecessarily expensive, and job- and wage- destroying regulations. To remove these areas of regulation from the bill would be to severely weaken the bill's important reforms to lower the crushing cumulative cost of Federal regulation and increase the accountability of our regulatory system to the people. These include regulations such as the Environmental Protection Agency's multi-billion-dollar Utility MACT regulations. The Supreme Court recently invalidated those regulations, but not before the targets of the regulations had to spend multiple years' worth of compliance costs. Had the REINS Act been in place, Congress could have refused to approve those regulations to begin with, saving billions of dollars in unnecessary cost. I urge my colleagues to oppose the amendment. I reserve the balance of my time.
