[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 37 (Wednesday, March 4, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1288-S1289]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          KEYSTONE XL PIPELINE

  Mr. HATCH. Mr. President, I wish to address today's vote to override 
President Obama's veto of the bipartisan Hoeven-Manchin bill to 
authorize the Keystone XL Pipeline.
  Our economy and North America's energy security would greatly benefit 
from building this pipeline. It would increase our GDP by approximately 
$3.4 billion annually. The State Department, which has provided clear-
headed analysis of the benefits of this project, has found that 
Keystone would support roughly 42,000 jobs during the construction 
phase alone. It would provide refineries with up to 830,000 barrels a 
day of North American oil.
  Moreover, the Keystone XL Pipeline would be an environmentally sound 
way to transport this oil. The State Department's extensive 
environmental impact statement concluded that building the pipeline 
would actually be better for the environment than not building it.
  We have to be clear here. This oil is going to go to market no matter 
what. Building Keystone would take oil off the tracks and off the 
roads, transporting it in a way that is safer, more efficient, more 
environmentally sound, and better for creating good-paying American 
jobs.
  In his veto message, President Obama suggested that an issue such as 
this is somehow too important to be left to the legislative process and 
that we should trust in the integrity of the regulatory process.
  This is exactly the sort of debate we should be having in the Senate. 
This is the body that is supposed to debate the important issues of the 
day. When a project as important as this is stalled without meaningful 
justification for so long, our involvement is even more important.
  In our consideration of this bill, we legislated according to the 
best traditions of this body, including robust debate, an open 
amendment process, and regular order. After years of mismanagement, our 
consideration of this bill showed how the Senate is back at work on 
behalf of the American people under our new leadership.
  While I certainly hope we will find another means of approving the 
Keystone XL Pipeline, I am naturally disappointed that we came just a 
few votes short of overriding the President's veto and enacting this 
bill into law. Furthermore, I can certainly understand why many 
Americans will view this occasion as yet another example of how 
Washington is broken.
  In many respects, I share this same frustration. Nevertheless, we 
cannot allow ourselves to slouch toward pessimism and disillusionment 
about every institution. Indeed, I think my fellow colleagues on both 
sides of the aisle merit praise for their responsible handling of this 
bill. Instead, we should shine a light on where exactly the problem is 
and offer real solutions to make Washington work on behalf of the 
American people.
  At the end of the day, the Keystone XL Pipeline and so many other 
bureaucratic failures just demonstrate that our regulatory bureaucracy 
is broken. After all, this project is now in its sixth year of limbo, 
waiting for a single permit to be issued. This debate has gone on 
longer than an entire term of a U.S. Senator.
  It should not take years and years of navigating the Federal 
bureaucracy only to have the government decide not to make a decision. 
This new Congress is focused on helping to create jobs and getting our 
economy back on the right track, which is why regulatory reform must be 
a key part of our agenda over the next 2 years. We must strive not only 
to approve this particularly important project but also to prevent 
similar abuses from occurring in the future.
  Perhaps the two most troublesome features of the modern 
administrative state are, first, the size of the regulatory burden on 
the economy and, second, the lack of accountability in the regulatory 
bureaucracy. Both problems have been illustrated by the Keystone XL 
project, but they manifest themselves across the board throughout the 
regulatory process.
  The growing Federal regulatory burden has been a concern for decades, 
but the problem is now worse than ever. Both the number of regulations 
and their combined cost have exploded in recent years. The American 
people are now bound by more than 1 million individual restrictions in 
the Federal Register, with a total cost of around $1.86 trillion each 
year. To put that in perspective, that is about 11 percent of our total 
GDP, it amounts to about $15,000 per household, and it totals over $300 
billion more than annual individual and corporate taxes combined. In 
short, our regulatory burden is enormous.
  Even as we resist President Obama's mad dash to add new rules, our 
Nation simply cannot afford to ignore the crushing burden of existing 
regulations. They weigh down our efforts to boost economic growth and 
make it impossible to get our country back on track.
  Every President, from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama, has embraced the

[[Page S1289]]

notion that outdated, unsuccessful or otherwise ineffective regulations 
should be repealed. Nevertheless, the cumulative regulatory burden 
continues to expand year after year.
  To address this growing problem, I will be partnering with 
Congressman Jason Smith to sponsor the Senate version of the SCRUB 
Act--Searching for and Cutting Regulations that are Unnecessarily 
Burdensome. This legislation creates a bipartisan commission to examine 
the entire administrative corpus in search of regulations that are 
obsolete, outdated, ineffective, overlapping, duplicative or 
unjustified. Its goal is to achieve a 15-percent cost reduction in our 
Nation's total regulatory burden. The Commission can recommend either 
immediate repeal or incremental reform through a flexible procedure 
that puts the agencies and stakeholders in the driver's seat.
  The SCRUB Act transforms a longstanding bipartisan commitment to 
retrospective regulatory review from mere rhetoric into meaningful 
reality. It would result in lower prices, higher wages, and more job 
opportunities for hard-working Americans. All the while, such 
commonsense regulatory review poses no risk to our health, our safety 
or our environment. It is the kind of legislation that can earn support 
from both sides of the aisle and for which there is a realistic path to 
having it enacted into law.
  A second critical flaw in the current administrative state is a 
fundamental lack of accountability in how the Federal Government makes 
and enforces regulations. Far too often the agencies and interest 
groups manipulate the rules and stack the decks against innovators, 
entrepreneurs, and ordinary citizens.
  Thankfully, there are a number of potential avenues for meaningful 
reform, but the one area that has thus far escaped much legislative 
attention is the role the Federal judiciary plays in the regulatory 
process. Given the broad authorities Congress has ceded to 
administrative agencies, the courts often stand as the only truth 
independent check on increasingly out-of-control regulators. But recent 
abuses by the political branches have created serious challenges for 
effective and appropriate judicial review on the regulatory process.
  By writing vague laws, Congress has created extraordinary flexible 
grants of authority that are both unwise and constitutionally 
troublesome. Judicial deference to agency interpretations of the law 
has magnified this power to an extreme degree. Although originally 
intended as a means of curtailing judicial activism, Chevron deference 
and its associated doctrines have resulted in a gross misallocation of 
lawmaking authority. Such doctrines have consigned courts to be 
rubberstamps, rather than effective checks on administrative overreach.
  The threat of toothless judicial oversight of increasingly 
problematic regulatory action was only heightened when President Obama 
and his allies packed the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals with compliant 
judges even less inclined to engage in meaningful administrative 
review, and Congress's creation of broadly available private rights of 
action to challenge administrative decisions and regulatory activities 
has opened another avenue for abuse of the courts.
  While these provisions provide important opportunities for regulated 
parties to defend their liberties, too often they have allowed groups 
with no concrete stake in the process to use the courts as a means to 
drive their own ideological agendas.
  Worse yet, inconsistent efforts by the judiciary to define the 
constitutional limits on standing have inadvertently created a perverse 
environment where businesses with real skin in the game are often shut 
out of court, while special interest groups with no meaningful injury 
in fact are allowed to litigate.
  Restoring the constitutionally proper judicial role is vital to 
returning accountability to the regulatory process. In reviewing agency 
actions, courts should hear only real cases and controversies, where 
litigants have concrete interests at stake. But when they do, they 
should state firmly what the law is and not simply ratify what the 
regulatory agencies argue that the law should be.
  Legislation to ensure meaningful reform on each front and thereby 
bringing the administrative state more in line with the Constitution 
will be one of my top priorities in this Congress.
  It is disappointing that we could not override the President's veto 
of this important legislation. The failure to authorize Keystone 
demonstrates how broken our regulatory process is. I hope we can use 
this occasion of bipartisan consensus to move forward in ways that can 
fix our out-of-control bureaucracy and get Washington back to work for 
the American people.
  With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Gardner). Without objection, it is so 
ordered.
  (The remarks of Mrs. Murray pertaining to the introduction of S. 660 
are printed in today's Record under ``Statements on Introduced Bills 
and Joint Resolutions.'')
  Mrs. MURRAY. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Ms. MURKOWSKI. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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