[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 12]
[House]
[Pages 17605-17611]
[From the U.S. 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.
  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.

[[Page 17606]]

  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 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

[[Page 17607]]

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 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

[[Page 17608]]

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 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

[[Page 17609]]

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.
  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

[[Page 17610]]

     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 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

[[Page 17611]]

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.

                          ____________________