[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 113 (Thursday, July 26, 2012)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1341]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


         RED TAPE REDUCTION AND SMALL BUSINESS JOB CREATION ACT

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                               speech of

                            HON. RICK LARSEN

                             of washington

                    in the house of representatives

                        Wednesday, July 25, 2012

       The House in Committee of the Whole House on the state of 
     the Union had under consideration the bill (H.R. 4078) to 
     provide that no agency may take any significant regulatory 
     action until the unemployment rate is equal to or less than 
     6.0 percent:

  Mr. LARSEN of Washington. Mr. Chair, I rise today in opposition to 
H.R. 4078, which would cut critical regulations not with a scalpel but, 
like many have said, with a nuclear bomb. The transportation 
authorization bill, MAP-21, which this body passed with a widely 
bipartisan vote, included many important safety and efficiency 
regulations, but my amendment to exempt them was not made in order.
  If signed into law, this bill would pull the emergency brake and stop 
safety regulations which were just enacted. One important regulation 
this bill would block is the installation of seatbelts in motorcoaches. 
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration believes these 
seatbelts could reduce the risk of fatalities in rollover crashes by 77 
percent. Safety improvements like these will help prevent all too 
common transportation disasters, like the motorcoach crash in 2007 
which killed 7 members of the Bluffton University baseball team in 
Ohio.
  This is just a single example of the critical regulations that H.R. 
4078 would halt indiscriminately. I urge the House to reject this bill.

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