Congressional Oversight Revived
by Congressman John Carter

This past November voters made their voices heard through one of the biggest congressional landslides in American history. Since 2009 the country repeatedly screamed no to the Democrats’ political agenda. Yet they were ignored by President Obama, House Speaker Pelosi, and Senate Leader Reid, who used their heavy Democrat congressional majority to pass one unpopular bill after another on health care, energy, and "stimulus" giveaways of taxpayer money.

That majority is now gone, and the legislative blitzkrieg is over. But just as the voice of the people didn’t stop the President from ramming through horrible legislation, the electoral judgment of the people is not likely to stop him from trying to ram through the implementation of that legislation now.

As Republican Conference Secretary, I am committed to personally fight these attempts and support the efforts of all my fellow House Members over the next two years against what we know will be a regulatory counterattack by the entrenched bureaucrats of the left. And we have re-discovered a legislative weapon tailor-made for that purpose.

When Republicans last took back Congress from the Democrats in 1994, part of that year’s Contract with America was to pass a bill requiring federal agencies to submit all major proposed regulations for a 60-day congressional review before they could take effect. The Congressional Review Act was passed into law in 1996 to fulfill that pledge. Since then it has been largely forgotten, due to the fact we had eight years of a Bush Administration that put the brakes on bad rules, followed by two years of Democrat control of all three branches of government.

The Congressional Review Act was made for political times such as these. While we now control the House, we still have just 47 seats in the Senate with 51 needed to pass a measure and 60 for cloture to bring a bill to a vote.

But the Congressional Review Act makes an exception to those Senate obstacles. If the House passes a resolution under the powers of the Congressional Review Act disapproving a regulation, and just 30 Senators sign onto the effort, the Senate must hold an up-or-down vote. With this powerful legislative weapon in our arsenal, we can force public floor votes on many of the heavy-handed regulations attempted by the Obama Administration over the next two years.

This week I am re-introducing the first two CRA resolutions of disapproval for this session of Congress. The first would block the EPA attempt to impose draconian new air quality standards on the Portland cement industry that by EPA’s own estimates will lead to the loss of thousands of U.S. jobs and a net global increase in air pollution. The second resolution seeks to block the implementation of new medical loss ratio rules for insurers under Obamacare, which are estimated to shut down many individual and small group market insurers, causing millions of Americans to lose their health insurance plans.

We still have to win over a handful of Democrat Senators to pass these resolutions, and the President can still veto our disapproval. But these fights will bring to public light each specific outrage these liberals seek to force on their countrymen, and force the White House and congressional Democrats to unequivocally state for the record where they stand.

The liberal legislative agenda is now stopped, thanks to the November voters. The next two years of struggle will be to block the implementation of these bad laws, and to educate the public with laser clarity on the specifics of what these regulations will do to our freedoms. The Congressional Review Act will become a major weapon in this fight to revive the oversight authority of Congress, and assert the power of mid-term elections in a representative democracy.