The Day Before Thanksgiving, Obama Administration Announced 3,415 Job Killing Regs & 189 New Rules Costing Amercans Trillions

Today in Washington. D.C. - Dec. 4, 2014
The Senate reconvened at 9:30 AM today and resumed consideration of the nomination of Franklin Orr to be Under Secretary for Science in the Department of Energy.

At 10, the Orr nomination was confirmed by voice vote. The Senate then voted 89-3 to confirm Joseph Hezir to be the Energy Department CFO, 70-23 to invoke cloture on the nomination of Gregory Stivers to be United States District Judge for the Western District of Kentucky, 66-26 to invoke cloture on the nomination of Joseph Leeson, Jr. to be United States District Judge for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, and 55-36 (using Reid's nuclear option - less than 60 votes) to invoke cloture on the nomination of Lydia Griggsby, to be a Judge of the United States Court of Federal Claims.

At 1:45 PM, the Senate will vote on confirmation of the Stivers, Leeson, and Griggsby nominations. Senators will then vote on cloture motions on the nominations of Jeffery Baran to be a Member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Lauren McFerran to be a Member of the National Labor Relations Board, and Ellen Williams to be a director of ARPA in the Department of Energy.

Yesterday, the Senate voted 71-25 to invoke cloture on the Orr nomination and 68-27 to invoke cloture on the Hezir nomination.

The House reconvened today at 9 AM. The House received a message from the Senate. The Senate passed S. 2759, S. 2921, S. 229, S. 2523, H.R. 5681, H.R. 3682, H.R. 3375, H.R. 43, H.R. 451, H.R. 1391, H.R. 3085, H.R. 3957, H.R. 4189, H.R. 4443, H.R. 4919, and H.R. 5106.

As of this report, The House is debating a resolution to take up the following bills:
H.R. 3979 - Senate amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to ensure that emergency services volunteers are not taken into account as employees under the shared responsibility requirements contained in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
H.R. 5759 - To establish a rule of construction clarifying the limitations on executive authority to provide certain forms of immigration relief.
H.R. 5781 - To provide short-term water supplies to drought-stricken California.

Passed yesterday by the House (Votes on resolutions to advance consideration of bills are not identifies):
S. 2917 (Unanimous Consent) — "To expand the program of priority review to encourage treatments for tropical diseases."
S. 2673 (Voice Vote) — "To enhance the strategic partnership between the United States and Israel."
H.R. 647 (404-17) — "To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide for the tax treatment of ABLE accounts established under State programs for the care of family members with disabilities, and for other purposes."
H.R. 5771 (378-46) — "To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to extend certain expiring provisions and make technical corrections, and for other purposes."
H.R. 5769 (413-3) — "To authorize appropriations for the Coast Guard for fiscal year 2015, and for other purposes."
H. Res. 714 (voice vote) - "Reaffirming the peaceful and collaborative resolution of maritime and jurisdictional disputes in the South China Sea and the East China Sea as provided for by universally recognized principles of international law, and reaffirming the strong support of the United States Government for freedom of navigation and other internationally lawful uses of sea and airspace in the Asia-Pacific region."

In a key editorial today, the Las Vegas Review-Journal takes the Obama administration to task for yet more executive branch regulations that will cost jobs and the continuing attempts to bury their announcements during holiday weekends.

The editors write, “Do you remember when the Obama administration released its spring regulatory agenda right before Memorial Day? You don’t? Why not? Were you out of town or getting ready for a cookout or something? Did you hear about the White House’s regulatory agenda for fall 2014? What? You didn't hear about that one, either? That’s strange. It was released on the eve of Thanksgiving. Perhaps you were you traveling or spending time with family.

“Since you missed it, we’ll fill you in. The new package — the highest-priority rules for federal agencies in the coming year — is bigger than the previous agenda and contains 3,415 regulations, including 189 new rules that will cost the economy more than $100 million apiece. Its rollout marks the fifth time the Obama administration has released new regulations on the eve of a major holiday.

“Cost-hiking, job-killing rules are announced when the country is tuned out because the media inevitably move on to other stories by the end of a holiday weekend. The timing of such ‘news dumps’ is an admission that their content won’t be popular with the public.”

They go on to point out the most problematic regulation in this latest batch. “The costliest regulation, however, is the EPA’s long-planned ozone restrictions. Environmentalists and public health professionals tout the regulation’s positive impact on air quality, but it will actually do more harm than good. American air quality already is improving under existing regulations, but the new rules will force the owners of power plants and factories to install expensive technologies that will drive up electricity prices, kill jobs and, ultimately, deal a fatal blow to the coal industry.

“The EPA planned to release the new ozone rules in August 2011, but President Barack Obama, worried about his re-election chances, delayed it, saying the regulation would place an unfair burden on industry and local governments during tough economic times. Now, with the president safely re-elected, we are supposed to believe the same regulation would not create the same economic burden?

“The Obama administration claims to be champions of working families and the middle class, but the regulations on ozone levels, in particular — and almost all of its regulations, in general — are job killers. How, exactly, does killing jobs help the middle class?”

When the administration unveiled the proposal last week, Politico pointed out that “business groups charge could be the costliest regulation of all time.” The story explains, “[B]usiness groups are . . . adamant that a tough new limit on ozone would devastate the economy by making it difficult to open or expand hundreds of manufacturing plants in much of the country. ‘This would be the most expensive regulation ever imposed on the American public,’ said the National Association of Manufacturers, in a July study calculating that an especially strict version of the rule would wipe out $3.4 trillion in economic output and 2.9 million jobs by 2040. On Wednesday, the association said EPA’s proposal jeopardizes the nation’s manufacturing comeback and indeed ‘threatens to be the most expensive ever.’ The ozone draft ‘comes at the same time dozens of other new EPA regulations are being imposed that collectively place increased costs, burdens and delays on manufacturers, threaten our international competitiveness and make it nearly impossible to grow jobs,’ the group said.”

As the LVRJ editors write, “This latest round of rulemaking underscores the incredible, growing reach of the Washington bureaucracy, which has become the fourth branch of government — with no accountability to voters. If these new rules appeared on a ballot, guess how they’d do? They’d lose in a landslide. November’s elections, which gave Republicans control of the Senate and expanded the GOP majority in the House, were a referendum on President Obama’s governance.”

At a GOP leadership press conference on Tuesday, Sens. John Barrasso (R-WY) and Roy Blunt (R-MO) expressed their frustrations with this latest round of rules.

Sen. Barrasso said, “On the day before Thanksgiving, the president took another dramatic turn to the left by coming out with the mother of all regulations. It's called the most expensive regulation of all time -- on ozone. That Wednesday before Thanksgiving, over 600 pages of regulations, an appendix, another 575 pages of additional red tape that is going to impact families and communities all around the country in terms of manufacturing, agriculture production, energy production and just take-home pay for people. It affects their jobs. It affects the cost of their daily lives with these new regulations.”

And Sen. Blunt added, “[T]he administration always says on these excessive regulations that somehow the regulations on our utility bills are going to be paid for by the utility companies or the utilities and manufacturers. That's going to be paid by everybody that has a utility bill. This add-on on the day before Thanksgiving, you don't issue a regulation the day before Thanksgiving because you want people to look at it carefully; you issue it the day before Thanksgiving because you don't want people to know the impact this is going to have on them and on people that can't pay their utility bills now, on young people that won't have the job opportunities they'd like to have.”

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