During last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon espoused what he believes is the foundation of the Trump administration’s agenda: national security, economic nationalism, and the deconstruction of the administrative state. Elaborating on the third item, Bannon said, “The way the progressive left runs, is if they can’t get it passed, they’re just going to put in some sort of regulation in an agency.” This unnecessary expansion of the federal bureaucracy, he told the crowd, is what the Trump administration plans to deconstruct.
As David French noted last Friday,
[The REINS Act] is a simple but profoundly important bill. It prohibits any significant new agency regulation from taking effect unless it is ratified by each house of Congress. In other words, the Act will make Congress do its job. Congress will have to vote for the laws that have an impact on our lives for them to become law at all. The lawmaker will actually make law. The Founders would be pleased.
Signing into law the REINS Act would shift regulatory powers out of the bureaucracy and into the hands of elected officials, specifically when implementing regulations with major economic costs. A better way, however, would be to pass an amendment to the U.S. Constitution — the Regulation Freedom Amendment — that requires Congress to review all regulations.
The Madison Coalition, an organization that seeks to restore the proper balance between the states and federal government, is spearheading the movement to implement the Regulation Freedom Amendment.
“A Constitutional Amendment would bring a permanent end to ‘regulation without representation,’ no matter who controls Congress,” says the Madison Coalition’s director Roman Buhler. Ultimately, the amendment would require Congress to approve major federal regulations, and unlike the REINS Act, it would be difficult for pro-big government Congress’s to repeal in the future.
The proposed amendment has earned the endorsement of 21 state legislative chambers (seven states with bicameral legislatures), and if two-thirds of all state legislatures (34 states) pass resolutions in support the regulatory reform, Congress would be urged to — but not required to — propose and vote on the amendment. Last week, Arizona’s House became the latest legislative chamber to pass such a resolution.
Although earning support from two-thirds of the state legislatures seems to be a difficult task, it is certainly feasible. The Republican National Committee has already publicly endorsed the amendment, and if the 32 states with Republican control of both legislative chambers (plus Nebraska, a unicameral legislature with a Republican majority) pass resolutions in support of the Regulation Freedom Amendment, only one state would be missing.
