Seventeen days before President Donald Trump, his spoken oath of office still lingering in the wintry air, lifts his left hand from Scripture (a leather-bound edition of “The Art of the Deal”), the Republican-controlled Congress will begin working. Fittingly, on Jan. 3 the First Branch of government will go first, flexing its somewhat atrophied Article I muscles.
When Trump reaches his desk on the morning of Jan. 21, he should find there two congressional measures emblematic of how quickly elections can have consequences. One should be the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act (REINS). The other should be legislation mandating construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. As president, Trump will have the authority and intent to proceed with construction, but Congress should make the point that this concerns national policy, which Congress should set.
The REINS Act would begin Congress’s retrieval from the executive branch of responsibilities the Founders vested in the legislative branch. REINS would require Congress to vote on — to have its fingerprints on — all “major” regulations, understood as those with an annual economic impact of at least $100 million. Congress would thus take responsibility for, and be held accountable for, the substance that executive agencies’ rule making pours into the almost-empty vessels that Congress imprecisely calls “laws.”
After the preamble, the Constitution’s first substantive word is “all”: “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress.” But the more than 170,000 pages of the Code of Federal Regulations contain tens of thousands of rules promulgated by largely unaccountable agencies. The agencies fill voids in congressional “laws” such as the Dodd-Frank financial reform, which mandates, but does not define — that is left to executive rule makers — “fair, transparent and competitive” financial products and services. As of five years ago — it is substantially worse now — the government itself estimated that regulations cost the economy more than $1.75 trillion.