WASHINGTON — The House on Thursday approved a measure authored by Arkansas’ U.S. Rep. Tim Griffin that would place a moratorium on major new federal regulations.
The bill, called the Regulatory Freeze for Jobs Act, would block any new rule that is projected to have an economic impact greater than $100 million for two years or until the national unemployment rate drops to 6 percent or lower. In June, unemployment stood at 8.2 percent. The last time the unemployment rate registered below 6 percent was in July of 2008, when it was 5.8 percent.
The vote was 245-172, with 13 Democrats crossing party lines to vote in favor of the bill, and two Republicans voting against it. Each member of Arkansas’ congressional delegation, including Democratic Rep. Mike Ross, voted for the bill.
Proponents of the measure said it would calm businesses’ fears about new regulations, spurring them to hire more workers.
“Hardworking Americans deserve a regulatory system that doesn’t hamstring their ability to invest, hire and grow,” said Griffin, a Little Rock Republican.
Opponents said blocking new rules threatened public health and the environment, and they questioned why safety regulations for children, senior citizens and veterans should go into effect only if unemployment falls below a certain level.
On Monday, the Obama administration threatened to veto Griffin’s legislation.
The Office of Management and Budget said federal regulations already must go through cost-benefit analyses, are subject to public-comment periods and undergo reviews after they are put in place to ensure that they are working.
Griffin’s bill “would un- dermine critical public health and safety protections, introduce needless complexity and uncertainty in agency decision-making, and interfere with agency performance of statutory mandates,” according to a “Statement of Administration Policy” issued by the Office of Management and Budget.
Rules dealing with national security, criminal investigations and civil rights, trade agreements and responding to imminent health and safety threats are exempt from the moratorium spelled out in the bill.
Under Griffin’s bill, the president could request a congressional waiver if he felt that a proposed regulation was especially important.
“The Constitution says the Congress is the source of all legislative authority,” Griffin said in an interview Thursday. “It is completely appropriate for us to have the final say” on proposed regulations.
During debate in the House on Wednesday and Thursday, Democrats slammed Griffin’s measure as a “message” bill that had no hope of passage in the Democrat-controlled Senate.
U.S. Rep. Gerald Connolly, a Virginia Democrat, said he had a “deep suspicion of political legislation that employs arbitrary across-the-board mechanisms that make for good talking points but terrible policy. Such messaging bills make a mockery of the legislative process.”
Democrats unsuccessfully offered amendments to the bill to exempt, among other things, nuclear regulations, rules on off-shore bank accounts and rules governing high-voltage power lines.
Scott Slesinger, legislative director of the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council, called the bill a “sad attempt” to block health, safety, economic and environmental protections.
“It amounts to ordering a government shutdown, and it’s a kind of coup d’etat by the most recalcitrant special interests,” he said.
Republicans countered that only 66 of the 3,000 regulations put into effect last year would have been blocked under the bill.
Republican U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa of California, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the legislation would create jobs by allowing small businesses “the opportunity to take a breath, evaluate what is the lay of the land and go forward with a business plan, no longer worrying that out of the blue will come major regulatory changes.”
Citing statistics from the U.S. Small Business Administration, the Arkansas State Chamber of Commerce said regulatory compliance costs small companies $10,585 per employee per year, or 36 percent more than for larger companies.
Griffin’s bill didn’t travel in a straight line on the House floor.
When the Rules Committee, which decides on the timing for debate on how many amendments may be considered, issued a draft of the bill Wednesday. It read that no new regulations would be allowed until the “employment” rate fell below 6 percent, rather than the “unemployment” rate.
On Thursday, as the House considered an amendment that would correct that error, lawmakers noticed that a number in the bill had been written “738” rather than “783,” prompting another correcting amendment.
The confusion over the typos prompted an exchange on the House floor between Rep. Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Rep. Virginia Foxx, a North Carolina Republican.
The two lawmakers resorted to quoting Latin to get their points across.
Frank, who noted that the numerical error came on the corrected draft of the bill, asked, “Who corrects the correctors,” adding, in Latin: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes,” a phrase often translated as “Who will guard the guards themselves?”
Foxx offered a “mea culpa,” adding: “I don’t have a Latin quote for Murphy’s Law,” the popular axiom that if anything can go wrong it will go wrong.
“We are all human beings,” Foxx said, adding that neither of the mistakes were made by a member of Congress.
“Blaming the staff, I never like to do that,” Frank said. “Yesterday the mistake was letters, today it was numbers. I suppose tomorrow it will be astrological signs.”
Griffin said the focus on the typos was “silliness.”
“These things happen,” he said. “Committee staff works late and long hours.”
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/27/2012