The Wall Street Journal hosted an op-ed by President Obama today.
From child labor laws to the Clean Air Act to our most recent strictures against hidden fees and penalties by credit card companies, we have, from time to time, embraced common sense rules of the road that strengthen our country without unduly interfering with the pursuit of progress and the growth of our economy.
Sometimes, those rules have gotten out of balance, placing unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs. At other times, we have failed to meet our basic responsibility to protect the public interest, leading to disastrous consequences. Such was the case in the run-up to the financial crisis from which we are still recovering. There, a lack of proper oversight and transparency nearly led to the collapse of the financial markets and a full-scale Depression.
Over the past two years, the goal of my administration has been to strike the right balance. And today, I am signing an executive order that makes clear that this is the operating principle of our government.
This order requires that federal agencies ensure that regulations protect our safety, health and environment while promoting economic growth. And it orders a government-wide review of the rules already on the books to remove outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive. It’s a review that will help bring order to regulations that have become a patchwork of overlapping rules, the result of tinkering by administrations and legislators of both parties and the influence of special interests in Washington over decades.
I think dday is right in that this is sort of a "Clintonite revival" of regulatory streamlining, and that it "doesn’t mean the end of meaningful regulation (in fact, written into the EO is a requirement that agencies take into account “values that are difficult or impossible to quantify, including equity, human dignity, fairness, and distributive impacts,” which I think is great), it doesn’t end public comment phases of rulemaking (in fact, there will be much more public information revealed upon adoption of the EO), it doesn’t mean a radical change to how regulations will impact businesses (in fact, care will be taken to allow for flexibility for small businesses), it doesn’t do much of anything other than apply the principles of technocratic governance to the regulatory state."
What it does, do, however, is reinforce the Chamber of Commerce/GOP narrative that government is bad and is killing the jobs--a narrative that is particularly harmful with a Republican House determined to dismantle both health reform and financial reform by attacking the very regulations upon which these reforms depend. The Center for Progressive Reform's president, Rena Steinzor, put it this way:
[T]he President embraces a frame for the coming discussion about the role of regulation in society that is right out of the Republican hymnal, calling for “balance” between safety and economic growth, and bemoaning regulations that sometimes “plac[e] unreasonable burdens on business—burdens that have stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs.”
He also used the op-ed to announce a new initiative “to review outdated regulations that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.” By casting the discussion in those terms, the President swallows the GOP’s frame for the debate hook, line, and sinker.
If you listen carefully, you might hear the voices of disbelief and anguish from the families of the 11 workers killed in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the 29 workers whose lives were extinguished at the Big Branch mine, and the nine who died after eating peanut butter crackers and similar products infected by salmonella....The families, friends, and co-workers of these victims of under-regulation and under-enforcement might conclude that the United States is reverting to a place where the government most definitely does not protect people who can’t protect themselves. Sure, they think to themselves as they read about the president’s new détente initiative with big business, we all need jobs, but aren’t all those billions in profits and executive bonuses enough for the business sector? Didn’t the government bailouts of the big banks do the trick?
And the reaction of those with whom he's seeking détente? The Chamber of Commerce can represent them: they called it "a positive first step." It's not enough for them. Nothing this president can do will be enough for them.