Republicans on the House Science Committee tweeted an absolutely fake story with fake sources to pretend that everyone didn’t just experience a run of extraordinarily warm months, but the shot fired by the know-nothings didn’t go without rebuttal.
With ice at the poles at record low extent, temperatures in the Arctic far above normal, and 2016 about to pass 2015 as the hottest year on record, the Republican tweet is the very definition of “post-truth,” and Democrats lined up on Thursday to fight back against the fake-news tweet from the House “science committee.”
However, the climate battle is just a preview of what’s to come, as Republicans dig out a rarely used, decades old tool to scrape the whole idea of science out of the government.
As has been widely reported, a Trump administration can easily repeal regulations that were enacted by federal agencies in the final months of the Obama administration. But with the help of a few key new bills that are currently making their way through Congress, he could also thwart the very infrastructure of science-based policy-making, transforming it from a process that’s merely frustrating into one that’s also futile.
The Congressional Review Act (CRA), one of Newt Gingrich’s creations during his Contract With America days, allows Congress to quickly toss any regulation in a way that can’t be stalled or filibustered. No public hearings. No value test. Just boom, it’s gone.
If that sounds bad, the CRA has a second act that’s even worse. Once a regulation has been killed by the CRA, it can’t be put back, not even by a new administration. The law prevents instituting new regulations that are “substantially the same.” So if the CRA is used to remove regulations around some pollutant, or destroy a safety rule, or eliminate protection for a species … that’s it. Barring a new law (from a substantially new Congress), the fight is over.
In most situations, the CRA has limits, but this isn’t most situations.
It only becomes powerful under a very particular set of circumstances—when an incoming President wants to negate their predecessor’s recent works, and when their party controls both houses of Congress. That’s what happened in March 2001, when George W. Bush repealed a Clinton regulation that protected workers from ergonomic injuries—the only time in history when the CRA has been successfully used.
If Bush used this rule a single time, Trump and the new Republican majorities in both houses could pull it out almost daily. What could they go after? Everything. Ozone. Methane. Formaldehyde. Drilling in the arctic. Endangered species everywhere.
“There’ll be strong incentive for the Republicans to go after as many regulations as they can,” says Amit Narang, a regulatory policy advocate at Public Citizen.
Republicans in the House have already warmed up the system to make the CRA work even faster.
On November 17, the House of Representatives passed the Midnight Rules Relief Act—an amendment to the CRA, which allows Congress to disapprove of many regulations in one fell swoop.
If this act passes the Senate, regulations can be piled together and executed in one shot, again with no means of delay or hope of filibuster. Never to be seen again.
Republicans are also pressing other laws to limit the ability to impose new regulations. These laws would subject any new regulation to congressional review, and subject every regulation—no matter how important to health, safety, the environment or anything else—to purely cost-based tests. This test could very well be used to strike down any regulation, as Republicans will get to define the parameters of the cost-evaluation.
The REINS Act (Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny), currently making its way through Congress and likely to pass in the next term, discards the whole idea of scientific review in favor of a political test. Which will make it simple to not only remove regulations, but also to impose them as punishment.
As it is, making regulations isn’t easy. Agencies have to recruit scientific experts, do research, compile evidence, go through peer review, face pushbacks from industry, and give the public many chances to comment. At any time, they could be sued or challenged in court.
The REINS Act gets rid of all those experts, research, and review. Which mostly means that industry only gets the regulation that industry wants—which is none.
This isn’t the first version of the REINS Act. Previous versions have floundered because they were strongly opposed by the president—even Republican presidents—as a surrender of regulation authority by the executive branch. But this time, it’s different.
... the REINS Act will find a champion in Trump. Even though signing it represents a surrender of executive power, he has already promised to do so, and to “work hard to get it passed.”
With the CRA to destroy existing regulations in a way that doesn’t just kill them, but salts the ground for the future, the Midnight Rules Relief Act to super-power the CRA and make it possible to bundle regulations without limit, and the REINS Act to make it nearly impossible to pass meaningful regulation in the future, Republicans have a tool box full of instruments to remove any hint of scientific oversight.
There’s a good argument to be made that all of these bills violate the Constitutional boundaries between the Legislative and Executive functions. Which might make a difference—unless the challenge comes to a deeply conservative Supreme Court.
Take a deep breath. Now hold it. It may be a long time before you can take another without risk.