[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 28 (Tuesday, March 5, 1996)]
[House]
[Page H1665]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




             REGULATORY RELIEF FOR SMALL BUSINESS COMMUNITY

  Mr. GEKAS. Mr. Speaker, it was 1 year ago today when during the 
flurry of activity that accompanied the floor action with respect to 
the Contract with America that this Chamber passed overwhelmingly 
several pieces of legislation, all combined to relax the stranglehold 
that the various agencies have had for generations over our small 
business community.
  These regulations have served over the years to strangle competition, 
to subdue the freedom to exercise new ideas and innovative ways to 
bring new products and new services to the marketplace. So, as part of 
the Contract With America, the House endeavored very early, right at 
the outset of the new legislative year in 1995, to bring about hearings 
and examination of the issues involved. As a result we are now poised 
here in this week of legislative action to put the final touches on 
some of these relief measures for our small business.
  Some of the important features that we have taken into the regulation 
reform arena are, No. 1, we have strengthened the hand of counsel for 
the Small Business Administration who before had a role to play, under 
the original act, in advising, so to speak, the small business 
community as to the impact of regulations. But now we strengthen his 
position by giving him additional powers and more flexibility and more 
actual power to be one of the decisionmakers as to the final texture of 
a rule or a regulation that would affect small business.
  We have done other things with respect to the kinds of analyses that 
must be accorded to the public and to the small business community by 
the agencies involved so that they will have a better idea and a more 
involved undertaking on themselves to deal with the agencies and in a 
cooperative manner bring about the final product of a regulation. Thus, 
we would be having a rule or regulation offered in which the small 
business community, the one that would be affected, would have had a 
part in creating. That is a new way and a good way to do business in 
this very important sector of our business activity.
  Third, and this, to me, is the most important new feature of what the 
Contract With America and what my committee and the committee chaired 
by the gentlewoman from Kansas [Mrs. Meyers] has been able to 
accomplish, is to bring about for the first time an opportunity for 
judicial review. That is, a small business or entity or individual who 
is adversely impacted by a regulation that says you must do this. Many 
times the regulation has taken on the form of an edict, a mandate, an 
unappealable fiat, as it were.
  What now we provide for is judicial review. So if in the final 
analysis, after this joint venture of trying to create a regulation 
that everyone can live with, if everything else fails, we also give to 
the disaffected regulatee, if there be such a word, the option to 
appeal to have a judicial review of that situation.
  Now, this is important, of course, in its own right, just to bring 
about a new set of rules between the business community and the 
agencies of the Federal Government. But that is not the real reason, 
the real emphasis that we should be placing on what we are 
accomplishing here. What we are accomplishing here is creating an 
additional atmosphere for the creation of new jobs, for the creation of 
new business activity, for the lifting up of the American business 
community into a new and better stance for competitive enterprises 
throughout the world.
  This is the importance of what we are about here today and for the 
remainder of this week. When these provisions become law, we will have 
fulfilled the Contract With America, that portion of which promised to 
the American people that we would unsnarl the number of lassos that are 
thrown around our business communities by the Federal agencies through 
their regulations and we would loosen them up for the business 
competition and activity with which they will lead the world.

                          ____________________