Joe Biden is president for at the very least another
8 plus months,
but he has only weeks left to safeguard his key
policies and regulations from a potential Donald Trump victory.
The Biden administration is right now trying to rush out
in final form all of the regulations that has been
working on for a couple years to make sure that
they are final before the Congressional Review Act cut off
date.
The 1996 law allows an incoming president to unravel the
previous administrations recent rules and regulations with support from a
simple majority in the House and Senate.
It was adopted during the the time when Bill Clinton
was president and Newt Gingrich was the Speaker of the
House.
There were a lot of conflicts
and Congress, the majority in Congress felt that it should
have more ability to control what the administrative state does.
The rules are obscure, but basically,
once a federal agency reports a new rule to Congress,
Congress has 60 working days to introduce a joint resolution
disapproving of the rule.
The Congressional Review Act essentially gives Congress the opportunity to
get on the record,
but it rarely makes it to the
president's desk. That's largely because no sitting president is likely
to overturn a rule he or she made,
which is why the CRA has only ever succeeded when
a new president comes in.
It's an extraordinary step. It had been considered to be
an extraordinary step Before this administration.
Only one time in our history had a president signed
a bill
that used the CRA to cancel a federal
regulation. So we're doing a lot of them.
In 2017, then President Trump and the Republican controlled Congress
used the CRA to overturn 16 Obama era rules.
I will keep working with Congress,
with every agency, and most importantly with the American people
until we eliminate every unnecessary,
harmful, and job killing regulation that we can find.
We have a lot more coming.
It's going to be happening.
And when a president signs ACRA that overturns a rule,
it prevents federal agencies from ever issuing A substantially similar
rule unless specifically authorized by Congress.
After Trump successfully used the CRA 16 times,
Biden's first months in office included three of his own.
The fact that we have the community,
the Congressional Review Act, means
that we can undo that damage and undo it quickly.
And now, with Trump back on the ballot,
George Washington University research shows the Biden admin is finalizing
rules this spring at a pace that far exceeds any
other time in his term to get ahead of that
sixty working day window. There's every reason to believe that
he would want to revoke as many of the Biden
era regulations as he could,
just as in the first term he revoked a lot
of the Obama era regulations.
Trump's campaign confirmed as much,
spokesperson Caroline Levitt said. When re elected president,
Trump will immediately cut Joe Biden's burdensome regulations,
unleash our domestic energy industry and implement a pro worker
agenda that will uplift all Americans.
It's only in the last couple of decades that we've
tended to have such radical shifts in
federal policy as we go from one party to another.
And Michael Gerard says that environment has made the business
environment more chaotic.
It's completely disruptive because for one thing,
industry needs to know what investments to make.
They need to know how clean their power plants need
to be,
what kind of automobiles to make all across industries.
Companies rely on predictability for what regulatory schemes will apply.
Of course, CRA has just scraped the surface of what's
possible to undo presidential legacies.
On the day that Donald Trump was first inaugurated as
president,
we launched Our Climate Deregulation tracker because we knew it
was we knew what was coming.
And on the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated,
we rebranded it the Climate Reregulation Tracker.
Columbia Law School's Saban Center for Climate Change Law tracked
176 deregulation actions during Trump's administration and
214 re regulation actions during
Biden's. Gerard says since it's so difficult to get new
legislation through Congress,
presidents are increasingly resorting to executive moves.
On the day that Joe Biden was inaugurated,
he walked into the White House for the first time
as president and had on his desk in the Oval
Office a stack of executive orders that he signed within
hours of taking the oath of office.
He was signing those in order to revoke a lot
of the Trump policies that had been issued just as
executive orders and to start instituting new policies.
Executive action can be swift,
which means it can also be fleeting.
Rule that can be adopted with a stroke of a
pen can be revoked with a stroke of a pen,
and that makes it far more difficult for industries to
predict what's going on and to act accordingly.
Gerard says the energy industry is downshifting ahead of the
election,
hesitant to make large investments without knowing what November will
bring.
I'm Simon Del Rosario for Straight Arrow News.