Within the last hour, the House of Representatives approved the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act – the REINS Act. The bill was among House Republicans’ top priorities for the year, and they’ve made it and a series of other anti-regulatory bills a centerpiece of their agenda. The plain purpose of the REINS Act is to make it all but impossible for the nation’s regulatory agencies to adopt regulations that would enforce a host of protective laws, including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Occupational Safety and Health Act, and many others. The Act would permit Congress (in fact, just one House of Congress) to ignore these legislative mandates in deciding whether to approve regulations, opening the door for much greater politicization of the regulatory process. House Republicans have pursued it in part to prop up their disingenuous argument that regulation is somehow the cause of the nation’s economic difficulties, and in part as a reward to high-dollar donors who’d just as soon go on polluting for profit, cutting corners on workplace safety, and in a variety of other ways subjecting Americans to preventable deaths and illnesses.
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Sidney A. Shapiro | December 7, 2011
Within the last hour, the House of Representatives approved the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act – the REINS Act. The bill was among House Republicans’ top priorities for the year, and they’ve made it and a series of other anti-regulatory bills a centerpiece of their agenda. The plain purpose of the […]
Isaac Shapiro | December 7, 2011
Cross-posted from the Economic Policy Institute’s Working Economics blog. Isaac Shapiro is EPI’s Director of Regulatory Policy Research. The House of Representatives is poised to vote for the REINS (Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny) bill today; this would come on top of votes on two bills last week that would also upend […]
Rena Steinzor | December 6, 2011
Booth Goodwin, the U.S. Attorney for the southern district of West Virginia, and Attorney General Eric Holder announced today a landmark settlement with Alpha Natural Resources, the coal company that bought out its rival Massey Energy after a catastrophic explosion deep within the Big Branch mine killed 29 miners. Alpha recently announced that its third […]
Rena Steinzor | December 6, 2011
New York Times columnist David Brooks weighs in this morning on CPR’s latest report, Behind Closed Doors at the White House: How Politics Trumps Protection of Health, Worker Safety and the Environment. To his credit, he begins by dismissing one of congressional Republicans’ principal lines of argument for 2011 – that an imagined tsunami of […]
Ben Somberg | December 2, 2011
The CPR white paper on OIRA earlier this week looked at how this little office within OMB facilitates an industry-dominated process that serves to weaken regulations proposed by federal agencies. Appearances by industry representatives have outnumbered those by public interest lobbyists more than 5-to-1 in meetings at OIRA in the last ten years, the paper […]
Ben Somberg | December 1, 2011
The “Regulatory Flexibility Improvements Act” (RFIA) and the “Regulatory Accountability Act” (RAA) are headed for votes on the House floor shortly (today and/or tomorrow). The “Gum Up Public Health and Safety Protections Act” apparently wasn’t going to sell as well. A quick recap of the Regulatory Accountability Act, via CPR Member Scholar Sidney Shapiro’s Congressional testimony […]
Matt Shudtz | December 1, 2011
This week OSHA expanded a two-year-old enforcement program aimed at preventing catastrophic release of highly hazardous chemicals—the type of headline-grabbing event that ruined thousands of lives in Bhopal in 1984 and was narrowly avoided in West Virginia in 2008. Originally targeted at just three regions (and optional for state-plan states in those regions), the National […]
Robert Adler | November 30, 2011
When the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral argument in PPL Montana, L.L.C v. State of Montana on December 7, it will consider issues of constitutional history dating to the early days of the American Republic and legal sources that some claim (and others dispute) trace to Magna Charta and the Institutes of Justinian in Roman law. […]
Sidney A. Shapiro | November 29, 2011
Republicans in the House have spent much of the fall trying to blame regulation for the nation’s slow economic recovery. The fact that there is no reasonable evidence to back up this claim is apparently not a concern for the regulatory opponents. Moreover, regulatory opponents skip entirely over the impacts of the failure to regulate, […]