[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 175 (Wednesday, November 16, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H7691-H7697]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
GOP JOBS OFFENSIVE: ROLLING BACK JOB-KILLING REGULATIONS
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 5, 2011, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Carter) is recognized
for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. CARTER. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
We're all glad to be back in the capital city to talk about the
regulations that are drowning our country, and we have got some
legislation that's going to try to do something about that.
I see that some of my colleagues are here to join me in talking about
these things. I've been on the floor of this House now for the last 18
months explaining to people how these regulations are killing jobs in
this country. And really what it cuts down to what we need to turn this
country around, we don't need big stimulus spending. That didn't work.
We tried that. We don't need the government to tell us how to run our
business. We need the people to be able to run their business with the
government getting out of the way.
And so we have today several bills that we think are going to be very
important to tell us just exactly how we can make sense out of this
overwhelming amount of regulations.
[[Page H7692]]
Thousands of regulations just this year have been proposed, many of
which will kill hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country.
I have two of my colleagues that are here. I will first recognize my
friend from Kentucky--I think he has somewhere to go--to tell us a
little bit about a solution that he has proposed.
Mr. DAVIS of Kentucky. Thank you, Judge Carter. I appreciate your
holding this tonight and your flexibility in allowing me some time to
share as we've talked about before at times on the floor various
aspects of the growth of the regulatory State.
The issue is not being against regulation or for regulation. The
issue is having transparency and accountability. We've seen in this
administration and the last administration, the administration before
that, an ever-increasing reach in agencies where they're stretching the
law, whether it's the Clean Air Act of 1972 that's being stretched to
proportions far beyond the original intent of Congress or issues
related to the Clean Water Act that stretch beyond the bounds of
science, to unfunded mandates in No Child Left Behind from the last
administration. We can think of a wide variety of these issues.
For me, I think the American public wakes up when it hits them in the
pocketbook, when it hits you and me in the pocketbook. In our case, you
probably experienced the same thing in Texas.
The year that I was sworn into Congress, a consent decree was forced
upon our local community for nearly a billion dollars in storm water
compliance that was not only beyond the needs of the community, it was
beyond the economic capability of the community to comply.
That was based on a rule issued by an interpretation of a law that
had been passed 8 years before in a different Congress, in a different
political climate. And again, our citizens, the citizens of the Fourth
District of Kentucky, citizens of districts across the United States,
had no recourse but to comply with this.
One of my constituents walked in as we wrestled with different
aspects of not limiting regulation but providing accountability,
providing the opportunity for the voters, our citizens, to be able to
hold the government accountable for what it does, walked in and said to
me, ``Jeff, why can't you guys vote on this?'' And we had a revelation
in a different way to come back and address the issue of regulatory
transparency.
Standardization is important, but it needs to be at a place that the
American people agree with and support and is practicable from the
standpoint of cost. And the economic cost is often not incurred in
this. We have towns across the United States, across the Ohio Valley
whose compliance cost with just that regulation alone is more than what
the budgets of the communities are on an annual basis. It's
unreasonable, and there is no recourse.
So we went back and we researched and found a portion in the
Congressional Review Act of 1995 that we suggested changing. And to the
shock of many of my constituents, only one regulation has ever been
repealed in the history of the Congress. That was the Clinton-era
ergonomics rule that had the House, the Senate, and a President who
would sign that.
{time} 1810
So you have to get, in effect, a majority in the House, a
supermajority in the Senate, and then have a Chief Executive who is
willing to change that or to prevent that regulation from going into
effect.
What we wanted to do was something a little bit different. It's done
in industry; it's done in business. In effect, it's done in virtually
all competitive sports, where, if something gets out of bounds or out
of expectation, the game stops. In production, on the assembly line,
when the red light comes on, the line stops, and people have to take an
extra look at what the issue is. In this case, what we wanted to do was
have a simple process to restore transparency and congressional
accountability of what the executive branch does, which was the genesis
of the REINS Act. It's really a very simple thing.
The REINS Act stands for Regulations from the Executive in Need of
Scrutiny. It's H.R. 10 in this Congress. The number on the chart up
there was from the last Congress, H.R. 3765. Basically, what it does is
it requires Congress to approve all new major rules so that ``major
rule'' is defined as one that has $100 million or more in cumulative
economic impact across our country.
What our bill will do is really very simple.
Once a rule comes to the end of its 60-day comment period, it would
have to come back up to Capitol Hill for a stand-alone, up-or-down vote
under a joint resolution in the House, in the Senate, and then be
signed by the President of the United States. It's making the point
that for any major rule, a rule that reaches into the pocketbooks of
all hardworking, taxpaying Americans, they have a right to be able to
hold their elected Representatives and Senators accountable for the
position that they take on that direct economic impact.
For me, I think it's fine. There are times that America will stand up
and say, Yes, we agree with this, and this is the right thing to do.
There are other times, particularly in hard economic times like today,
when the last thing that we want to do is increase that regulatory
burden, that out-of-pocket cost on America's citizens.
To give you an idea of this, the cost in 2009 alone for the
compliance of regulation on our economy was $1.75 trillion. If some
significant portion of that regulatory process were streamlined, that
would be creating jobs and, ultimately, more taxpayers.
Mr. CARTER. Let me point out that the $1.75 trillion is more than the
entire income tax for that year that was collected by this country. So,
when you talk about a burden, it's more than the entire tax burden of
our Nation for that year.
Mr. DAVIS of Kentucky. I think the gentleman has a great point. In
fact, it comes down, I think, to about $10,000 for every man, woman,
and child in the United States of America for the cost of regulatory
compliance.
To your point, why it's so critical now is that we've seen agencies
in the last administration and in this administration that have gone
into overreach. Most importantly, what we saw happen in the last
Congress was a Democratic supermajority in the House, in the Senate,
with a liberal Democratic President, who was out to keep his campaign
promises. I can respect that. The American people spoke in that
election, but they also spoke in the election that followed last year
in that they did not agree with the overreach, be it legislative or on
the regulatory side; and they made a change, certainly, in this body.
The administration proceeded at that point to attempt to enact cap-
and-trade rules--an energy tax on every American--by regulation. When
the Congress in a Democratic supermajority could not pass those bills
in order to send them to the President's desk, they were intent on
doing it by executive order.
It's the same thing that we see happening potentially with the card
check-forced unionization bill. It could not pass in the last Congress,
so we see attempts to move that by regulation. There are issues with
unfunded mandates on our schools. We're even seeing an extension of
that inside the Department of Education, which further hamstrings
already strapped local school districts. It could not get through the
United States Congress, so we're seeing attempts to do that by
regulation.
What the REINS Act would simply do is say, Stop, Mr. President. Stop,
Cabinet Secretary. You have to have the advice and the consent of the
representatives of the American people before you're going to move for
something that's going to hit us that hard. We have 197 cosponsors on
the bill so far. Two hearings were held on this in the Judiciary
Committee. It was passed out of the Judiciary Committee 2 weeks ago. We
had a markup in the Rules Committee to go over some technical pieces
inside of the bill regarding the timelines on vote triggers. It passed
out of the Rules Committee; and we're looking for a vote here,
hopefully in the very near future, to see it passed and sent over to
the United States Senate.
I appreciate what the gentleman from Texas is doing to champion this
move to not only awaken the American people to the huge economic impact
of
[[Page H7693]]
overregulation, but to present a wide variety of legislative fixes that
you and many of our colleagues have authored to stem this tide of
overreach of the government and to allow our economy to stand up in
energy, in manufacturing, and agriculture. With that, I thank you.
Mr. CARTER. I thank the gentleman from Kentucky for the work you've
done on the REINS Act.
This is a good bill. This needs to be passed by Congress. I hope that
our colleagues over on the Senate sides, when they grab ahold of this,
get excited about it and realize that regulations impose more burdens
on the American people than this Congress does. In many instances, they
come to us and say--Why did you pass this law that puts this burden on
us?--when the real issue is they don't understand that it was done by
regulations, by people who were not elected, unlike the Members here.
We have to answer to our boss, and our boss is the American people.
Unfortunately, with regard to these regulations done by the executive
branch agencies, I guess the only boss they have to answer to is the
President.
In many instances, they're even independent of the President. Some of
these regulations are not thought out in the real world. They're, in
fact, thought out in the minds of somebody who sits at a desk and just
thinks, This has got to be a good idea. Sometimes these good ideas
overwhelm us in costs and, quite frankly, interfere with our lives.
So we've been talking about this. The American people are talking
about it. When you go home, they want to know, What are you going to do
about allowing the businesspeople to have an idea of what the playing
field is going to look like? because these regulations are changing the
rules every time we look up.
This leads us into what, I think, is another excellent piece of
legislation that I'm proud to be a part of. My friend from Wisconsin
(Mr. Ribble) is the actual originator of this bill, and I jumped on it
with him because I thought it was a good idea.
So I'm going to yield to my friend and let him have a chance to
explain this to you and what his idea was and why we both got into this
mess of trying to make it clear for those who would make our economy
grow, just exactly what the playing field looks like.
Mr. RIBBLE. I want to thank my friend from Texas. Thank you so much
for allowing me to join you on the floor today.
I spent my entire adult life running my own business, so this is
something that I've had the opportunity--or maybe the misfortune--to
deal with firsthand. I found it interesting that, just a few weeks ago,
on October 25, Politico ran an article which said right here:
``Regulations: Top Issue for Small Businesses.'' In fact, they cite a
Gallup Poll that, indeed, 41 percent of small business owners said that
government was somehow related to the biggest problem facing their
companies. More small business owners view the costs of complying with
government regulations as a bigger problem than any other issue.
I've heard this time and time again.
Just recently, I was up in northern Wisconsin, in Rhinelander,
Wisconsin, where three other Members of Congress and myself held an
all-day session with the timber industry. We invited Chief Tidwell,
from the U.S. Forest Service, to come in to talk about harvesting
timber in our national forests. I had a timber manager come up to me
who harvests timber up in the Wisconsin North Woods.
She said to me, Congressman, I want to show you something. If I do a
timber sale here that's regulated by one of the counties here in
northern Wisconsin, this is the contract that I have to fill out to
harvest timber. That's the county contract.
Then she said, But do you know what, Congressman? If the State of
Wisconsin manages that timber sale, the contract gets about twice as
long, and I have to manage that contract. However, if the Federal
Government manages the timber sale, this is the contract that we have
to fill out for the Federal Government.
There are pages and pages and pages of bureaucrat red tape just to
allow them to harvest timber that's owned by the taxpayer.
So I thought, after hearing a lot of these things and after having
run my business, that maybe what this country needs more than
anything--and I certainly support Congressman Davis' REINS Act. I think
it's exactly the right thing to do. But I'll take it a little step
further.
You and I together put together a bill called the Regulatory
Moratorium and Jobs Preservation Act. This bill simply does one thing.
It says that the government can't promulgate any new rules until
unemployment goes below 7.8 percent, because you and I know full well,
in talking to all the businesses in our own districts, that
unemployment and regulatory environment are connected. They're linked
together.
{time} 1820
Now I will have colleagues from the other side of the aisle say to
me, Well, Congressman, you know full well that this is all about
demand, that demand is causing the problem; and without demand, people
aren't going to hire. And I would say back that every single page of
regulation, every single page of trying to comply, every single page
has to be responded to by some business owner, and that means that
response will have a direct cost to it.
As you pile on cost after cost after cost, there have been 24,000 new
rules promulgated on the American business owner since 2004, nearly 1
million pages of new regulations. Every single page, page after page
after page, adds costs. And every single time the cost of any good or
service goes up, there are fewer customers that can afford that
product, so demand must go down. So every time we add a new regulation,
costs go up, demand goes down.
Finally, we've come to a new end game here with over 9 percent
unemployment. So we wanted to connect our bill to unemployment so that
we can show the American people, prove to the American people the
empirical evidence that if we would put a hold on new rules and
regulations, if we would inject certainty in this regulatory
environment where business owners knew what future costs were going to
be, they could measure future costs because they know that government
won't promulgate a new rule, they will begin to hire again. That new
confidence will be there, a new certainty will be there, and
unemployment will go down.
Then, here's what I suspect will happen: As unemployment goes down,
the American people will demand from Congress that we extend this rule
until unemployment reaches 6 percent, or we get to full employment as
we find this out.
Now, this rule does not remove a single safety net. This rule does
not remove anything that's already there. I have heard people say,
Well, you are just trying to destroy the environment, as if I don't
want to breathe clean air, as if I don't want to drink clean water, as
if I want my grandchildren to swim in lakes and streams that are
polluted. It's ridiculous on its face. I want to breathe clean air like
every American. I want to drink clean water like every American. I want
to eat safe food like every American. And this bill will do nothing to
remove any of those protections whatsoever. What it will do, though, is
stop the administration from, by executive fiat, creating rules and
regulations that haven't been created by this Congress. It will stop.
I was listening as my colleague from Kentucky was speaking, and I was
struck by something. I was struck by this: Article I, section 1 of the
United States Constitution says, ``All legislative powers herein
granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall
consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.'' Now, that word
``all,'' three simple letters, is pretty inclusive. ``All,'' it means
all of them. And what the REINS Act does, it says that any rule that
gets promulgated, the Congress, the duly elected Representatives of the
citizens of the United States, get to say whether that makes a law or
not. We get to say because the Constitution gave us, the Members in
this body and the Members in the U.S. Senate, the authority to execute
legislative power, not some Federal agency. And this REINS Act will
reel it in.
My bill and your bill, Representative Carter, will extend this
control by the Congress, and it will simply return the
[[Page H7694]]
power back to our legislative, duly elected Members of Congress.
Mr. CARTER. Reclaiming my time, you just said a magic word that I
want to repeat--``responsibility.'' Our Founders designed our form of
government so that we defined rights in our Bill of Rights, but it also
points out where the responsibility lies. And I would argue that these
creations of regulatory acts, it allows people to avoid being
responsible. They pass a law in Congress for the timber industry, and
they give the authority to a branch of the executive to write rules to
implement that legislation, and it allows this Congress to hide from
those regulations. It's one of the reasons I've been talking up here
for a year and a half now about regulations.
We all know our rights. It's time for those of us who have accepted a
position of responsibility to be responsible. And when an unknown
bureaucrat in a cubbyhole somewhere in the vast jungle of offices in
this town can write a regulation that affects the very lives of
American citizens--and he's going to get his paycheck. Nobody elected
him. He's not going to get fired. You don't get run off for writing
that regulation. He has been assigned to do rules and regulations. He
doesn't take responsibility for it. He's hiding as a bureaucrat back
there as civil servant.
It's time for the Congress to step back up, based on the Articles of
the Constitution that you just read, and take our responsibility. And
then those of us who answer to the people every 2 years and every 6
years--they're our bosses. They're the people who have hired us for
this job. And when they have one of these regulations, they have
somebody they can go to and say, You need to be responsible for
implementing the regulatory moratorium and for stopping these
regulations. They are killing us.
Let me just give you some examples real quickly that we've gathered
on just some stuff that--these are current events. This is like looking
back at current events for the last 6 or 8 months.
EPA greenhouse gas regulations, the potential job loss as a result of
those regulations, 1.4 million jobs; new utility regulations, 1.4
million jobs; offshore oil and gas lease delays, 504,000 jobs; offshore
drilling permitorium--they say they are going to introduce permits, but
then they just don't ever get right around to doing it--430,000 jobs;
reclassification of coal ash as hazardous--it affects this area right
here--316,000 jobs; the new boiler regs that are coming out, 60,000
jobs; the Alaska drilling delays, 57,000 jobs; the new cement kiln
regulations, 15,000 jobs. Just that little block adds up to 4,182,000
jobs that regulations are going to add to the unemployment rolls at a
time when we have got unemployment at 9 percent.
And, by the way, I like the concept that you introduced and explained
to me: Go back to what the unemployment was at the time that this
administration came into being, 7.8 percent. I think that's more than
reasonable.
Mr. RIBBLE. I couldn't agree more. As a matter of fact, unemployment
has never been lower since the day President Obama was sworn into
office.
I'm a freshman Member of Congress. I had the privilege of sitting in
this Chamber for the President's State of the Union address. And the
President said in that State of the Union address that he was going to
ask for a regulatory review of the executive branch. He wanted to know
what they were going to be doing, and he would make jokes about some of
the ridiculous regulations.
And what we've done now--we've got one more President who's followed
the traditions of dozens of Presidents who have ordered another study.
In the meantime, the American people suffer while we study something
that we already know. This is not so much about whether the government
can create jobs. It's about whether the government is obstructing job
creation, which is exactly what's happening. And that's why we decided
to pick that number.
Mr. CARTER. I think that's creative thinking. We need to get
unemployment below 7.8 percent. But it's a good point to start, and it
gives us an opportunity to target what I honestly believe and a lot of
economists agree with: The real solution to this situation we're in
with our country right now is to get Americans back to work.
The President believes one more stimulus. The last one didn't work.
The massive spending, the trillions of dollars of additional debt we've
accumulated in the last 3 years didn't quite work. It wasn't quite big
enough. We need to do it just one more time. And this time it will push
it over the top. Well, I just don't think that the American people are
buying it. They're watching the current events of today, where we loan
money to companies that didn't have a concept that was going to pay for
itself, and they're going broke; where we threw money at a problem
instead of putting some common sense into the problem.
{time} 1830
As a businessman, you nailed it. And you were one. For a while in my
life I was a small businessman. You've got to know what's around the
corner. You can't hire somebody if there's unknown around the corner.
Because when you hire them, you get around the corner, you might have
to fire them because that unknown is going to make it to where it's not
profitable for you to have this person who you hope will make your
business more profitable. They would make it less profitable.
People don't seem to understand around here. They think people hire
people because somebody gives them a tax incentive or there's some
incentive. Somebody gives them a little extra money this month. No, you
hire someone to make your business more profitable. It's about
prospering in your business. If you don't need somebody to prosper your
business, you're not going to hire them. And all of the incentives in
the world aren't going to make you hire somebody that doesn't make your
business work. Whether you're a little bitty business or the biggest
business in the world, that's the way it works.
So the reality is, as they plan--and, you know, there was a time, I
read an article on this, there was a time when business planning was
relatively short term. In fact, one of the things that came out of the
Great Depression was the concept of long-term planning, both short-
term, mid-term, and long-term planning for a businessman because you
needed to know not only what was around the next 2 years, or the next 5
years. You needed to know around at least the next 10 years.
That's one of the reasons why when we have these tax bills that we
have passed that will just end on a certain day, well, if you know it's
going to end, you have to plan around it. You plan to avoid it, but
when that drop-dead date comes up like we've got on the Bush tax cuts
they call them around here, businessmen are looking at those and
asking: What's that going to mean to my bottom line? I don't know, so
I'm not hiring. I'm not expanding my business. I'm not building a
building because I don't know what that means. Unknown regulations in
the minds of regulators could change my world, could absolutely shake
my world.
So this--and right at this time in this economy, when the number one
thing you hear from every businessman you talk to is the unknown,
whether it be the new financial regulations which have made financing
unknown, whether it be the hidden tax increases in the health care
bill, or whether it be regulations that we don't understand that we
were surprised to get, we don't know what's going to happen, so we're
not doing anything. We're sitting with our hands in our pockets, hope
there's a little money in those pockets while we sit there, and we're
not doing anything until we know what is going on. That's why this
moratorium is perfect--perfect.
Mr. RIBBLE. I think there is something salient here that we really
need to hit on. We, you and I, believe, as do many of our colleagues
and, more importantly, small business owners and large business owners
alike believe that this type of bill will actually increase employment.
The very interesting point about this is it doesn't cost the taxpayer a
penny. What this will cause is businesses that have now been putting
their money in the bank and have been holding it because of fear, we
will unleash that money back into the private sector to create jobs and
get this economy going, and not a single penny of taxpayer dollars will
be expended as a result of this. This is a simple thing.
You know, since the President talked to us back in January, over
70,000 pages
[[Page H7695]]
have been added to the Federal Register. Seven thousand pages. 539
rules have been deemed significant under Executive Order 12866. Stop
and think about these numbers: 116.3 million hours of annual paperwork
burden being added. And all of this continues to create that
uncertainty. Why would you as a business owner spend any money when you
have no clue what that future cost will be.
And just recently, I was talking to some friends of mine in my
district at Thilmany Pulp and Paper Company in Kaukauna, Wisconsin, the
hometown where my roofing company is; and they were sharing with me
their concerns about the EPA clean-air ruling and a new rule called
Boiler MACT. They said if that rule was promulgated, Wisconsin's paper
industry would be decimated. But what is really most troubling is the
fact that this is a revision of a rule that they just put in place a
few years ago. So the entire paper industry in Wisconsin had to upgrade
their boilers, spend millions of dollars of investment; and then a few
years later the EPA came back and said, whoops, we made a mistake, we
need to move the bar up again.
And rightfully so, these business owners are calling their
Congressman. This time it's me. I'm sure you've heard from them in your
own district, asking: Well, if we spend another $50 million or $60
million, what assurance do we have that the EPA won't move the bar
next year? And then we have to spend it again and again and again. At
what point is clean air clean air? And that's the problem.
I'll tell you, it would be very simple, when you start talking in the
millions and millions of dollars, it's very simple to lose thousands
and thousands of jobs. This is exactly where our national economy is at
right now. There has been an onslaught of regulations dumped on the
American entrepreneur.
Let's talk a little bit about access to credit. I've been very
critical about the Dodd-Frank bill. I understand the intent was to get
at Wall Street, and I appreciate the intent of getting at the things
that caused our economic crisis back in 2008.
But what actually happened is it got at Main Street. So small
business banks in my hometown of Appleton, they are now spending money
and investing money and hiring regulatory analysts when they ought to
be hiring commercial lenders. You know, most jobs created in this
country are created by small businesses. But in reality, it's really
small businesses under 5 years old, businesses that need access to
credit.
I often wonder would someone like Steve Jobs be able to emerge in
this type of environment today, building computers in his garage. I'm
sure there's some rule against that now. You can't imagine. I chuckled
the other day when I saw a famous television host on MSNBC standing
with her hard hat by the Hoover Dam saying we need big projects like
this; we need big thinking like this. Franklin Roosevelt ushered in
these great programs to create jobs and generate energy. This was the
boom day of the American mind. I had to chuckle thinking there'd be no
way with the current EPA that you could ever, ever build the Hoover Dam
today. It just wouldn't happen. The environmental rules alone wouldn't
allow for it.
Mr. CARTER. Absolutely. You'd be dealing with the EPA. You'd be
dealing with fish. You'd be dealing with the situation on endangered
species, and that's clear down to the microscopic animals that you
can't even see. All that. There's no way the Hoover Dam would get built
like that.
There was a thing on the History Channel, I guess it was the night
before last that I watched, about the building of the Alaskan highway.
We had gone to war with Japan, and everybody looked at the United
States and said my gosh, the Aleutian Islands, a part of the Alaskan--
at that time Alaskan Territory, they're right close to the Japanese,
and they're probably going to invade those islands. And how are we
going to get materials, supplies, and men up to Alaska? There was no
road between the United States and Alaska.
Nobody checked a single regulatory act. Nobody did anything but say:
Get every bulldozer we've got and head for the border. We're cutting a
road straight up through Canada. We'll design it on the way up there.
We'll direction it on the way up there. They took off and they built a
road. It was a gravel road, but it was the first road that connected
the lower 48 to Alaska.
I looked at that thing and I said: My gosh, they wouldn't have gotten
a mile and a half before they would have been enjoined by every kind of
group on God's green Earth in this country under the present
regulations we have in place, not even expanded regulations which are
getting worse, the present regulations.
So when the President made that famous statement now that I've
enjoyed very much, he laughed and said that I found out shovel-ready
today is not really shovel-ready. And it's exactly the same regulations
we're talking about here that keep it from being shovel-ready.
We're building about a 21-mile stretch of highway in my home county--
trying to build one. We've been at it for 8 years. The money's in
place. Section 1 has got bulldozers sitting on the ground because
section 1 has been approved, and we're still trying to get 21 miles of
road built through regulations.
I will say now, after a little work on our part, some regulators are
being pretty reasonable, and we want to thank them for it. But the days
of the Hoover Dam and the Alaskan highway will never come back, not
with the regulatory environment we have here. What we're trying to do
is not let this thing expand any further. We're not trying to kill
species. We're not trying to mess up the air, like you said, or the
water. We're trying to say we've got a good situation in place.
{time} 1840
By the way, Mr. President, if it's a national security issue or a
national emergency, submit it to us. Tell us what the emergency is.
Let's visit with it, and if that's the case, this Congress will be
reasonable. If we need review of the courts and the individuals need
review of the courts, we provide that in here. It's very respectful of
other people's consideration on these rights. For a small bill, there's
a lot of good thinking in this bill.
Let me just read you something. This came out in the Columbus
Dispatch. This is a quote from there:
Obama's massive intrusions into the heart of the Nation's
economy have not helped: Buying auto manufacturers and
running roughshod over bankruptcy law and investor rights in
the process, taking over the sixth of the economy devoted to
health care, imposing a new regulatory regime on the
financial sector and spending hundreds of billions of
borrowed dollars with no very great benefit.
Add to this the recent actions of the Democrat-controlled
National Labor Relations Board. Perhaps its most damaging
move has been to bring legal action against aircraft
manufacturer Boeing Company for building a manufacturing
plant in South Carolina. The NLRB seeks to punish a company
for creating new jobs, at a time when unemployment is more
than 9 percent and the Nation's economic growth barely
registers.
The chilling effect on other companies that are considering
building new plants is incalculable.
These moves have cowed, usurped, paralyzed or blocked the
private-sector decision-making that is necessary to get the
Nation moving again.
That's a quote from the Columbus Dispatch on 9/5/11, this year. And
that's a perfect statement of a big picture of the regulatory burden
that's made the papers. But you can have just as much trouble with one
bug. So, as we deal with this, we've got to have something that says
King's X until we get this economy back rolling.
I will once again yield to my friend, and you tell me if you've got
other things you want to talk about.
Mr. RIBBLE. I thank the gentleman for yielding.
I just thought it would be interesting, the President was in here
just a few weeks ago with his jobs bill, and I was struck--I actually
came into the Chamber with the intent of not really being critical but
to try to find out what is it that we could agree on so we could maybe,
for the good of the American people, move those things forward. But I
was struck that the President didn't mention energy a single time.
Now, we've lost millions of jobs in the energy sector. Just recently,
the President decided to punt on Keystone, the TransCanada pipeline
which would have created thousands of jobs by even the lowest estimate,
thousands of high-paying union jobs. Fully, labor was supportive of it,
and he decided to kind of punt on that and not let jobs.
[[Page H7696]]
It seems like the President's jobs plan is really at the regulatory
agencies where, since he's been sworn into office, employment has
increased 13 percent. While the private sector is shedding millions of
jobs, the President has decided to hire thousands of people at Federal
regulatory agencies. Now, I guess it is may be so they can implement
the 3,573 new rules that have been put in place since January 2010.
We have to get to a place where we understand the connection between
employment, the connection between costs and jobs, and just American
competitiveness. How in the world can we have businesses compete in
this day and age when there's a constant onslaught from the Federal
Government?
I thought I might read a quote from CNBC. We asked several CEOs
leading up to the President's speech what bold steps President Obama
could take to reduce the 9.1 percent unemployment rate. John Schiller,
chairman and CEO of Energy 21 said:
If the government would get out of the way from a
regulation standpoint and let us, 21, do what we do good,
you'll see us continue to hire and grow this economy. I think
that's a message from across the board.
And I believe it is a message. For some reason, it just doesn't seem
like the executive branch fully understands how this economy actually
works. Obstacle after obstacle after obstacle, layer upon layer of new
rules and regulations, and each one of them hurting job growth and
employment in this country.
David Park, President and CEO of Austin Capital, said:
Regulations have companies running scared. They are coming
at businesses, and some new regulations are already taking a
toll while others will soon. This could be a real deterrent
to future entrepreneurs.
And since most jobs are created by entrepreneurial companies under 5
years old, the difficulty of actually even forming and starting a
company today is burdensome, and it's hugely complex, all because of
this endless stream of control and regulations as if Washington, D.C.,
as if you and I, Judge, have all the answers. We don't have the
answers. The answers are found in the private sector. The answers are
found in the citizens of this great country.
Recently, we passed a bill just the other day on ballast water. I sit
on the Transportation Committee, and I noticed while reading the bill
that the Federal Government was going to promulgate rules for ballast
water for ships that come into the United States and traverse
throughout the Great Lakes. Now, my home is in Appleton, Wisconsin,
just near Lake Michigan, just south of Green Bay, Wisconsin.
We have the Port of Green Bay there, and the concern was--I was
reading the bill--that the Federal Government exempted themselves, that
they were creating a whole new level of bureaucracy, red tape and rules
that they were going to promulgate on private shipping companies but
not on themselves. So a Federal science ship or an EPA vessel could
traverse the whole globe and not have to manage ballast water the same
way that everybody else did. So I added an amendment, and this body
passed it, that said that if the Federal Government is going to
promulgate rules on private shipping companies, they have to live by
those same rules themselves. It's high time that the Federal Government
begins to treat the government the same way they treat the private
sector. I think if we start doing that type of thing, some of these
problems will begin to go away.
Mr. CARTER. That's good common sense. Thank you for doing that. We
appreciate it.
Congressman Ribble, I understand you have some support for this bill
in the Senate. Would you like to tell us a little bit about that?
Mr. RIBBLE. Yes. There's a companion bill that is going through the
Senate right now. It's the identical piece of legislation. It was
crafted by Senator Ron Johnson, a colleague of mine from the great
State of Wisconsin. We thought it would be good for us to do a project
together. We talk quite often, and the idea of attaching the moratorium
to unemployment was Senator Johnson's idea. I thought it was a terrific
idea. And he now has a companion piece of legislation. He told me that
there are more than 20 cosponsors in the U.S. Senate.
And this bill now has over 70 cosponsors here in the House of
Representatives, and it continues to move forward. I'm very optimistic
that we're going to be able to pass this bill through this Chamber and
send it on over to the United States Senate where I hope reason will
rule the day, that they will see this doesn't remove a single safety,
it doesn't restrict any safety or put something out of the way that's
currently in place. It just says let's give the American entrepreneur,
the American job creator, some breathing space. Let's give them some
room to just have some certainty for the time being, until unemployment
starts to get going and the engine of our economy starts moving again.
And I hope that, and I challenge the United States Senate, after we
send this piece of legislation over to them, that with most haste that
they go ahead and pass it. And if they can't pass it, let's for sure
let the U.S. Senate have a chance and Members of that Chamber to vote
on it. They kind of have a method over there where they can protect
Members from having to make tough decisions. They just table a piece of
legislation and don't even vote on it. And I would challenge the Senate
majority leader that when we send H.R. 2989 over there, that they would
actually bring it to a vote, and let's have our U.S. Senate stand up
and say whether they agree with this or not and have them go officially
on the record about whether they believe that regulations are a problem
in this economy or not.
Mr. CARTER. And when the American people hear that once again we've
got over 20 bills that could have done something to turn this economy
around that have been tabled, I hope they will ask themselves, Why did
the Senate table my job? Because everything's about jobs. When you
table a piece of legislation, you're tabling somebody's job.
{time} 1850
One of the things that a lot of people don't understand--and that's
just because they don't think about it; once they start thinking about
it, they can understand it--that they hear something like the pipeline.
I happen to have spent every summer of my life from the time I was 15
until I graduated from law school working on pipelines. I have worked
on pipelines in Texas, Louisiana, and overseas in the Netherlands in
Europe, and in Belgium. So I'm an old laborer on the pipeline. When you
hear ``pipeline,'' you think the pipeline of the pipeline. But the
number of people involved in laying a pipeline and the number of
assorted jobs you don't even think about that are involved in that are
overwhelming. In many instances, you've got to cut roads out to where
the pipeline is going to be. So you've got road builders involved,
you've got gravel haulers, and in some instances asphalt layers, if the
farmer will let you.
You've got the pipe. The pipe industry is making pipe. The welders
are welding the joints. The people that are surveying are surveying the
project. The heavy machinery is digging the ditch. Many individuals are
cleaning the ditch with hand shovels because it's got to be a certain
way, or you get a process which can cause the pipe to have an
electrical charge on it. Engineers are engineering it; scientists are
studying it. The product that's going to flow down that pipeline is
being tested so that you see what stress levels you're going to have.
It creates jobs, not just a pipe; but there are hundreds and hundreds
of industries that are tied to just laying a pipeline.
If you're drilling an oil well, the same thing. Those offshore drill
rigs, you know who got hurt bad on that? The guys that feed those
people out there on those rigs and the helicopter pilots that fly the
food out there. I mean, it shut down restaurants and closed down
helicopter businesses in the gulf coast when we had the moratorium. We
forget those little guys that are providing those services for the big
ExxonMobil or some other platform out there. But in reality, there's
thousands of small businesses connected to any major project like that.
A minimum number of jobs for that construction on the pipeline, it's
been estimated, is 25,000 jobs. I can tell you, unless the world has
changed a whole lot since I was a kid, it's the best-paying job for a
laborer that I could find in the State of Texas for a kid my age. I
worked until I was 26 years old on
[[Page H7697]]
those things in the summertime, and it still was the best-paying part-
time job I could find anywhere in the State of Texas, or even better,
in Europe.
So the point being that there is a domino effect when there is a big
project like this, or the lumber industry you were describing in your
State, or the shipping industry on the Great Lakes. It's not just ships
that are involved in the shipping industry. It's hundreds of other
professions that are involved in the shipping industry.
And when we start thinking about that concept, when you go out and
hit the big guy--people around this country have got this idea that big
guys, big things are bad, and they don't realize that it takes hundreds
and sometimes thousands of little guys to keep the big guy's project
going. They're all making a living and they're all raising their
families and having their homes based upon that project. This is the
concept of what capitalism does and free enterprise does for our
country.
And when the regulators stop something like that pipeline, or when
they put a moratorium on it until after the election so you don't have
to talk about it during election time, that hurts little guys as well
as big guys. And it's a wrong concept. We've got to make this country
once again prosper, and it takes a lot of things to make it prosper. So
we're just asking for the government not to be one of the hindrances.
And I think that's what makes this a great bill.
We're just about out of time. I want to thank you for joining me and
explaining the bill and allowing me to be an original cosponsor with
you on this bill so we can work this together. I will do everything
within my power to assist you in getting this bill to this floor and
passed through this House; and hopefully Senator Johnson will get it
done over in the Senate, and we'll help him where we can. And it will
be good for America to say time out, time out on these regulations.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
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