This is LONG overdue — the Republican Congress has been giving away its power to the administrative state for years. Here is Alexandra Desanctis writing at National Review:
Using the previously obscure Congressional Review Act, legislators are restoring Constitutional federalism and correcting overreaching executive-branch regulations.
The Senate voted last week to overturn a Department of Health and Human Services rule regarding state disbursement of Title X funding. In addition to providing a much-needed restoration of federalism, the vote served as the latest example of the 115th Congress’s willingness to use a little-known provision, — the Congressional Review Act (CRA), — to undo overreaching regulations enacted by the Obama administration.
Early in this session, congressional Republicans announced their intention to use the CRA to reverse a number of Obama-era regulations that had been in place since the middle of last year. The CRA grants Congress the authority to disapprove of any executive-branch regulation that affects a third -party, if a simple majority in each chamber passes a resolution within 60 days of the rule’s enactment. It was passed in 1996, but Congress has rarely used it since. In fact, prior to this year, it had only been used successfully only once time: when President George W. Bush signed a bill rejecting an OSHA regulation left over from the Clinton administration. (Congress passed five resolutions of disapproval using the CRA under Obama, all of which he vetoed.)
So far this year, though, Congress has sent bills to President Trump’s desk bills that would undo several regulations enacted in the final months of Obama’s second term. Lawmakers have, for example, abolished a regulation requiring the Social Security Administration to identify individuals whose Second Amendment rights should be restricted, as well as the “resource extraction” rule, imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, that conservatives viewed as federal overreach.
Read more: National Review
