Conservative Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King is reportedly considering introduction of a bill that would repeal everything Obama has signed into law.
According to The Messenger newspaper, King made the comments while speaking to the Humboldt County Republican Party picnic, while reiterating his pledge to take the Obama administration to court over its DHS policy change that defers action against qualifying illegal immigrant students.
”I am bringing him to court and we’re going to defend the Constitution of the United States and the separation of powers,” King said.
King warned Homeland Security Janet Napolitano at a hearing last month that they would “see each other down the line in litigation.”
Before Congress left for the summer recess, King introduced the Sunset Act to require Congress to take an up or down vote on all new rules and regulations put forth by federal departments and agencies.
The legislation would also require that all current regulations be sunsetted and voted on by Congress for renewal.
“The Sunset Act will help to ensure that rules and regulations churned out by Washington bureaucrats are necessary and helpful, not burdensome and problematic,” King said Friday. “…Americans must be able to hold their elected officials accountable for the rules and regulations that the federal government imposes upon them, and the Sunset Act will do just that.”
“The legislation would also require that all current regulations be sunsetted and voted on by Congress for renewal.”
I like that idea. If a regulation is good, it should have easy passage, if not, it goes away rather than continuing to fester.
IMHO, no “regulations” should be enforced UNTIL Congress has voted on it, and all legislation should have a sunset. The legislature should never have ceded to power to make law to the executive.
they never had the authority to go outside the Constitution in the first place! STeve King is on the right track here; but should go further in clarifying that NO regulations written by executive branch agencies (administrative) have the force and effecet of law; only Congress has the authority to do that.
And he needs to write a bill the Repeals the Lacey Act as well as many others.
Texas has Sunset rules – keeps things lively.
I’m hoping Romney already has a research department keeping track of all the EO’s, policy directives and bureaucratic imposed rules and regulations to immediately abolish on Day 1. Personally, that could make the most powerful “Day One” Romney commercial ever.
“A Bill to Repeal Everything Obama Has Ever Signed Into Law?”
Never happen. Obama has spent his entire first term putting power in place to “Transform” the United States into something it was never intended to be.
Now that the progressives have complete control of the money supply, both ruling parties (the dems more than the repubs), SCOTUS, commerce and ALL the information supplied to the public through its vast control over the MSM, they have no intention of giving anything back!
Not only repeal the paperwork, but $h!+can every last appointee appointed during this administration. Absolutely every last one. They are not this country’s friends. My biggest beef with dubyah outside of that whole liberal-lite compassionate conservative thing was his allowing clintonistas to burrow in under his watch. They didn’t do him any favors. And to hell with the media. They aren’t going to like the GOP, evah, so get over it, ignore them and pander to the new media, like PJ Media. Now was that a suckup, or what?
I used to have a sign over my desk which said: “Remember, when the enemy is in range, so are you.” I pointed to it in lots of discussions with newly minted little governor’s staffers and commissioner’s office staff as they proposed some great new power that they wished they had and thought we should do something to give to them. I would just ask them how they’d like it if the other guys had that power. Any bill has a sunset; it sunsets the day you find 50%+1 in each body to repeal it. Likewise, every officeholder has a term limit; s/he’s limited to the number of terms to which the people will elect him.
Executive agencies don’t write regs just because they want to; they must be specifically authorized in the enabling legislation to promulgate regulations. By the way, it is very demanding, high-stakes work and you will develop a close personal relationship with lots of people you’d rather not associate with. It is black letter law that regs so promulgated must be within the scope of delegation by Congress and within the language of the enabling law. It is an unfair but winnable fight if a citizen or company believes that an executive agency has promulaged a regulation beyond its authority or its delegation, it can sue to have the reg set aside. This seems to be very rarely done with federal regs because it costs so much and takes so long to fight the federal government and some administrations know how to make your misery their mission if you take them on.
At the federal level, the one new toy I would like to have, though it is fraught with danger when there is a Democrat Congress and President, is the ability of Congress to vacate statutorily authorized regulations. I’d want limits on it so that it had to be done with specific, single title legislation, all the regs disapproved or none of them, no committee referral, required only a majority vote, and I’m ambivalent about whether a filibuster should be permissible. I’d also limit it to being done within one Congress after the promulgation of the regulation.
Much of the, frankly, usurped regulatory authority comes from lazy and sloppy legislation, often purposely so, that gives the executive branch WAY too much authority. Part of that is attributable to lobbyist written bills that are purposely deceptive, part to the fact that lots of Congresscritters are dumb as stumps and their staffs aren’t much smarter, though lots of them are pretty. A big help would be a requirement for single title bills. It can be gamed with paragraph-long titles, but it is harder and it is obvious that it is being gamed. Many state legislatures have much tighter rules about Christmas Tree bills, midnight amendments, earmarks, etc.; clearly the Congress likes the free-for-all in the US Capitol.
Art, agreed.
I cannot count the times I’ve told people that they should never give a politician extra powers they did not want to see in the hands of the politician they hated the worst. The politician they liked was not going to be in that position forever, and the power would stay with the position. Then what?