Regulation Without Representation

By John Sykes

I have been trumpeting that Barack Obama would do to us by regulation and executive order what he can’t do by legislation. The facts are beginning to roar.

In the must-read The Congressional Accountability Act, The Wall Street Journal has given us a primer and a solution to regulation with out representation.

For instance, as concerns Obama’s growth of regulatory excess:

The last two years have offered an especially instructive lesson in regulatory excess. "Major" regulations are defined as those with annual effect on the economy exceeding $100 million, and over the past quarter-century both Democratic and Republican Administrations have averaged between 30 and 40 such rules a year. The Obama Administration promulgated 59 major regulations in 2009 and 62 in 2010. Another 191 are in the works, many of them based on little more than a vague Congressional order. ( This would appear to average about a 100 major regulations per year in 2009-2011, three times the previous yearly rate!)

Further from The WSJ:

The Dodd-Frank financial reform is a tabula rasa that the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell estimates requires no fewer than 243 new rules by 11 agencies over a dozen years. In the mere 10 months since ObamaCare passed, HHS has engineered rules that impose both a ceiling on insurance industry profits and de facto price controls on private premiums. The EPA is abusing the clean-air laws of the 1970s to raise carbon energy prices as a cap-and-tax surrogate. Only last month, the Federal Communications Commission imposed "net neutrality" despite a federal court ruling that the action was outside its purview. There are many other examples.

Obama, without a new law in sight, has effectively terminated offshore drilling, is working on destroying coal mining, is putting vast acreage of our nation under government control, implementing his own immigration policy, and much, much more, all without Congressional approval.

As a solution, The WSJ and others have suggested that Congress must approve all major regulations:

Such a bill wouldn't be necessary if Congress did a better job of writing laws that specify what they mean and aren't as open to interpretation. But with unelected bureaucracies now determining the fate of entire industries and dictating individual behavior, the Reins Act is a constitutional way for Congress to hold itself and regulators accountable for what they do.

Don’t get buried by that huge DC pot-hole crew we call bureaucracy using rules we neither wanted nor legislated!

Please read the entire article here…

Let your Congressional members know how you feel! Now!