Don't want any person, place or thing, trying to pull the REINS in on me--

The House passed something called the REINS (or Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny) Act today. The idea behind the bill is that the controlling party of either chamber gets veto power over any new regulations of the federal government over industries. As far as these things go--it's so very, very Republican.  It's unlikely to clear the Senate, and even if it did, President Obama would surely veto the heck out of it. But just listen to this kind of rhetoric:

"Who do the regulators answer to? No one," said Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) in debate on the House floor. "When the regulators go to work every day, like most people go to work, their work assignment's a little different," Poe said. "In my opinion, they sit around a big oak table, sipping their lattes. They have out their iPads and their computers, and they decide, 'Who shall we regulate today?' And they write a regulation and send it out to the masses and make us deal with the cost to that."



Rep. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.), argued that if Congress can stop rules in their tracks, businesses will flourish. "Poll after poll of small business owners, of medium-sized business owners -- they will show you and tell you that major regulations are holding back their expansion and the ability of them to hire more workers," Quayle said.

That is just fabulous--the regulators are "sipping their lattes". I bet they go on to have an arugula salad for lunch after a hard half-day of regulatin'--so unlike the red meat job-creators, who probably take their coffee black and sweetened with the tears of widows.  You know, I'm not a government regulator, but I bet they probably consider other stuff, like employee deaths, possible dangers to consumers, the despoiling of the environment, and other bummers that serious people might think about after reviewing and considering pages and pages of data including heart-wrenching anecdotes about the victims of corporate abuses in the pursuit of profit--but that's just how I think. But no, really. Oak tables, lattes. Also--I'm not really sure what polls Ben Quayle is talking about. I don't really think the link between regulation and job growth has been all that conclusively proven.


I'm sure many informed people might be saying to themselves, "But I thought Congress already did have oversight over this stuff--and wouldn't this lead to gridlock in a climate where even pro forma stuff like judicial appointments and debt ceiling raises are subject to blocks and filibusters and all that?"  Yeah, you totally have that right.  It's a stupid bill--the big deal is trying to override presidential veto and basically weakening the government's effectiveness at regulating businesses overall. In that way, the road is made smooth for more fracking, and mountaintop removal, and arsenic in the apple juice, and deep-sea drilling disasters, and all the other kinds of stuff that sometimes remind us why a government should not, actually, be small enough to be drowned in a bathtub, but might actually play a protective role for its citizens.

In other words--such total crap.  But thanks, House Republicans, for really showing us what you all stand for. For the very next industrial disaster, I will surely be thinking of you.