After 222 Years, Turns Out the Constitution is Deficient

During a hearing debating the merits of H.R. 10, the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act, majority witness and former Congressman David McIntosh, discussing the REINS Act’s goal of sending regulations that implement law back through Congress, commented, “…and so in many ways what the bill does is correct a constitutional deficiency.”

Article II, Section I of the Constitution vests executive power in the President and the President only. Congress cannot and should not attempt to make every detailed decision about the enforcement of law, a notion recognized by the framers. On a more practical level, as Rep. Mike Quigley commented during the hearing, we don’t elect police officers, but that doesn’t mean they should not be permitted to enforce the law.

But yesterday’s hearing showed that the supporters of H.R. 10 cannot even begin to fathom the idea that the bill would intrude upon the separation of powers conceived in the U.S. Constitution – a constitution, I should remind Mr. McIntosh, that has worked fairly well for more than two centuries, without the help of the REINS Act.

Yesterday’s hearing also gave the bill’s supporters numerous opportunities to espouse the notion that regulations negatively impact the job market. Not surprisingly, none of the individuals making this claim presented any evidence to support their assertion.

James Lardner at Remapping Debate clues us in as to why the anti-regulatory crowd isn’t using real-life evidence to make their case: they can’t. “It turns out,” Lardner writes, “that it is easier to generate provocative rhetoric on this topic than to provide historical evidence for the proposition that regulations do, in fact, kill jobs.”

Lardner says that industry lobbyists have a history of overstating the link between regulatory compliance and jobs, and that they’re doing so again.

Remapping Debate even went to straight to the horse’s mouth to try to unearth one of these “job-killing regulations.” The journalism website asked several prominent critics of regulation, including REINS sponsor Rep. Geoff Davis, for examples from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the most maligned agency when it comes to regulation. However, Davis and others were “apparently unable or unwilling to do so.”

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