Here's what Congress should have been doing instead of trying to cobble together an ObamaCare replacement in 5 minutes. The priority should have been to undo everything Obama did from the easiest to the most difficult. And some easy opportunities were missed.
The window for Republicans to roll back Obama-era rules is closing.
Under the Congressional Review Act, Congress has a brief period of time to quickly revoke regulations passed in the final months of Barack Obama’s administration.
The deadline to introduce resolutions of disapproval on Obama rules elapsed Thursday, according to regulatory experts and a post on the Senate Republican Policy Committee’s website.
The GOP now has about five weeks to vote on the regulations previously introduced for repeal under CRA.
Since the start of the new Congress, Republicans have used this obscure law from 1996 to repeal 13 regulations that were finalized between June 13, 2016 and January 3, 2017.Of those, President Trump has so far signed eight into law. Before Trump took office, the CRA had only successfully been used once before, in 2001.
It's possible the window may still be open, but considering the judicial coups we've been seeing, it may be a long shot.
A coalition of groups led by The Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) claims Congress can still use the CRA to repeal rules going back to 1996.
Under the law, Todd Gaziano, a senior fellow in constitutional law at PLF, said the 60-day clock doesn’t start ticking until a rule is published in the Federal Register or reported to Congress — whichever comes later. He helped draft the law as a senior congressional aide in the 1990s.
Knowing agencies were trying to evade the normal rulemaking process, Gaziano said the authors of the law chose to broadly define what constitutes a rule so policy manuals and agency guidance would be included.
While those types of documents aren’t always published in the Federal Register, Gaziano said the CRA requires agencies to send a short report with the text of the rule and any cost-benefit analysis to the House, Senate, and Government Accountability Office before the rule can go into effect.
“Some rules have been mistakenly enforced, but are not lawful rules,” he said. “They were never in effect.”Some of the rules PLF and its partner groups, which include The Heritage Foundation, say could be overturned include 2012 guidance from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on employers’ use of criminal records in hiring and EPA guidance that served as the basis for the controversial Waters of the United States rule.
Those things are frankly far more of a priority, but Congress has been focusing its resolutions on areas disapproved of by various industry trade groups leading to very mixed results.