The return of divided government promises to bring with it a welcome, albeit temporary, reprieve from the unprecedented abuse of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) that we witnessed during the 115th Congress. As I argue in an article featured in the March/April edition of The Environmental Forum, published by the Environmental Law Institute, the CRA has become far too dangerous a law – and the happenstance of divided government should not be the only thing protecting the public interest from future abuses. Rather, recent experience has provided us with all the evidence we need to repeal the CRA – for the good of public health, safety, and the environment, as well as the integrity of our democratic institutions.
During the 115th Congress, anti-safeguard lawmakers demonstrated the full destructive potential of CRA, with Republicans working with President Donald Trump to deploy the law to repeal 16 different regulatory safeguards covering a wide variety of workplace, financial, and environmental protections. In the article, I argue that this experience has fully normalized abuse of the CRA, in which narrow partisan majorities use the law's expedited procedures to block implementation of broadly popular public interest laws – laws that those same members of Congress don't have the political courage to try to repeal or amend in the bright light of day.
As I note in the article, abuse of the CRA is part of a broader trend in the current hyperpartisan era of Congress in which legislators have spurned regular-order lawmaking in favor of "legislative gimmicks" to score short-term political points at the expense of the public interest. Others examples include the use of anti-regulatory riders on must-pass appropriations bills. To make matters worse, the sponsors of these measures often enjoy close financial ties to the industries that directly benefit from them, creating the appearance, if not the reality, of corruption. (As Michael Kinsley famously observed, "the scandal is what's legal.") By reinforcing congressional dysfunction and the public perception of impropriety, the CRA and other such legislative gimmicks risk further undermining the legitimacy and integrity of Congress at a time when public esteem for our democratic institutions is already at a dangerous low.
It is unlikely that we'll see a successful effort to repeal the CRA (or even legislation to defang it) in the near future. But it is also unlikely that we'll see the return of a Congress that works "for the people" as long as the CRA remains on the books.
You can find select articles from the March/April edition of The Environmental Forum on the Environmental Law Institute's website.
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James Goodwin | February 28, 2019
The return of divided government promises to bring with it a welcome, albeit temporary, reprieve from the unprecedented abuse of the Congressional Review Act (CRA) that we witnessed during the 115th Congress. As I argue in an article featured in the March/April edition of The Environmental Forum, published by the Environmental Law Institute, the CRA […]
James Goodwin | February 21, 2019
For affected indigenous communities in the United States and Canada, new oil and gas pipelines snaking across their lands represent a new kind of attack. Dirty, polluting, dangerous, and built without the communities' consent, these pipelines are the inevitable outcome of North America's hydraulic fracturing and tar sands oil "revolutions" that have played out in […]
David Driesen | February 20, 2019
Originally published in The Regulatory Review. Reprinted with permission. President Donald J. Trump has declared a national emergency to justify building a wall on the U.S. southern border, which Congress refused to fund. But Mexicans and Central Americans coming to our country in search of a better life does not constitute an emergency. Immigration at the […]
Joel A. Mintz | February 19, 2019
This op-ed was originally published in The Hill. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released an annual report Feb. 8 on its enforcement activities in fiscal 2018. After wading through a bushel full of cherry-picked case studies and a basket of bureaucratic happy talk, the report paints a dismal picture of decline in a crucially important […]
Daniel Farber | February 18, 2019
Originally published on Legal Planet. Trump finally pulled the trigger and declared a national emergency so he can build his wall. But if illegal border crossings are a national emergency, then there's a strong case for viewing climate change in similar terms. That point has been made by observers ranging from Marco Rubio to Legal Planet's […]
Frank Ackerman | February 14, 2019
Originally published on Triple Crisis. Second in a series of posts on climate policy. Find Part 1 here. According to scientists, climate damages are deeply uncertain but could be ominously large (see the previous post). Alternatively, according to the best-known economic calculation, lifetime damages caused by emissions in 2020 will be worth $51 per metric ton of […]
Frank Ackerman | February 11, 2019
Originally published on Triple Crisis. The damages expected from climate change seem to get worse with each new study. Reports from the IPCC and the U.S. Global Change Research Project, and a multi-author review article in Science, all published in late 2018, are among the recent bearers of bad news. Even more continues to arrive […]
Daniel Farber | February 7, 2019
Originally published on Legal Planet. Climate change is not just a long-range problem; it's one that will get much worse in the future unless major emissions cuts are made. For instance, sea levels will continue to rise for centuries. But the people who will be harmed by these changes can't go to court: they haven't […]
James Goodwin | February 4, 2019
Tomorrow morning, Neomi Rao, the current administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), is set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee for a hearing on her nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. If confirmed, she would fill the open seat once occupied by Supreme […]