While Keystone XL, Healthcare, Social Security and Immigration have been garnering much attention, on Tuesday the House passed a sneaky bit of legislation called the Regulatory Accountability Act that critics say would significantly undermine the government's ability to enact and enforce environmental and financial regulations and basically every federal agency responsible for protecting the citizens of this country from the abuses of large corporations. Republicans claim that government regulations are destroying the American dream but the question is just exactly whose version of the dream are they defending?
Ostensibly this law targets obscure areas "of the regulatory process that very few people understand," but in reality is so broad that it would affect all agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency.
"This is using that arcane process to basically undermine the entire regulatory system of the United States," said Ronald White, director of regulatory policy at the Center for Effective Government, which opposes the bill.
"It really covers the entire spectrum of public health and safety, worker health and safety, financial protections, consumer product protections -- just about everything that you can think about for which the government has a responsibility to ensure the public is being protected," White said.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
The bill would require each agency to publicize cost benefit analyses for each new regulation with direct costs of $100 million or indirect costs of one billion, and then automatically go with the cheapest option. Although agencies already do these cost benefit analyses, their responsibility has traditionally been to choose the option that best protects the safety of consumers rather than the least costly.
When it comes to the health and safety of citizens, automatically taking the lowest bid is a recipe for disaster. In my work I frequently have to review bids from contractors and I know first hand that companies will submit a lowball proposal just to get the job and then once the work is started the change orders and "unanticipated" expenses start rolling in. Either that or a couple of years down the road, after the warranty has expired, there are problems due to shoddy workmanship and cheap materials.
Republicans, with all their professed business experience, know this, and so it would seem obvious that the primary motivation behind this bill is not to help consumers/taxpayers and small business, but rather to sabotage the whole regulation process, opening it up to legal challenges at every turn and setting agencies up so they can blame the government for the inevitable failures. It is to make it easier for large corporations to pollute the environment and screw their workers.
"It’s basically modifying the Administrative Procedures Act, which has been in existence for 60 years, and saying we’re going to change that whole process in a way that would require agencies to do years more analyses, to expand analyses in ways that we don’t define but which would allow industry to challenge any regulation as being inadequate or inappropriate," White said, adding that some 74 new procedures and requirements would be slapped on agencies.
"This is a paperwork creation bill. This is a government inefficiency bill," Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.) said during House floor debate Tuesday.
Obama is threatening to veto the bill if it passes the Senate. On Monday the
White House said the legislation would actually increase costs.
"This bill would make the regulatory process more expensive, less flexible, and more burdensome — dramatically increasing the cost of regulation for the American taxpayer and working class families,” the White House wrote.
Republicans of course insist the bill is meant to simplify and "prevent new bothersome, overly burdensome rules." Hah!
In the words of the bill's co-author, Rep. Robert Goodlatte (R-Va.):
"All across this country people who have been struggling, people whose jobs and wages have been disappearing, people who have been leaving the labor pool for the dependency pool, people who have seen no way possible to start a new business, can feel in their bones that this American dream, the dream that they cherish and their children need is slipping away,"
The American dream, the American dream! Republicans hold out the American dream like a short change artist dangling a C-note in front of a cashier who finds out at the end of the shift that her register is short. When these GOP lawmakers go to sleep at night they must dream of fat, off shore bank accounts for themselves and their benefactors. They had their minimal regulations along with the lowest tax rates in the 1920's and again in the 2000's. Look what it got the people: The Great Depression and The Great Recession. Their version of the American dream is a guarantee of more upward income redistribution and widening income inequality. Their dream is of a country where industry can pollute with impunity and companies can pay their workers below poverty wages all in the name of profit and a free market. This bill is just more of the same bait and switch bull crap Republicans have been feeding the people for a century. What they offer is no dream. For the average American it is a nightmare.
9:03 PM PT: Fellow Kossack, LakeSuperior shared the following link in the comments. It adds a lot of detail to the damage that this bill will do if it becomes law.
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/...
Let's hope Obama follows through on his threat to veto.