http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/obama-rushes-out-rules-to-guarantee-legacy-223301Obama rushes out rules to guarantee legacy
The rush is designed to prevent a President Trump from undoing his actions.
By Timothy Noah
05/18/16 05:18 AM EDT
The Obama administration is shoveling out regulations nearly one-third faster in its final year than during the previous three — all to beat a May 23 deadline to prevent a President Donald Trump from overturning them.
A total of 195 regulations have been pushed through since Jan. 1 at an estimated cost of $69.5 billion to the nation’s businesses, according to the conservative American Action Forum. One of the most significant — a sweeping rule that will extend overtime pay to more than 4 million people without any input from Congress — was released Tuesday night.
“This regulatory onslaught has only gotten worse in the administration’s final months,” complained Rep. John Kline (R.-Minn.), who chairs the House committee on Education and the Workforce.
The whoosh of final rules on everything from e-cigarette use to greenhouse gas emissions exceeds the pace during the same period in the Clinton administration. The goal is to deny Trump the opportunity to kill those regulations under an expedited process should he be elected president and Congress remain in Republican control.
Obama has used his regulatory authority in the face of a hostile Congress to edge the country closer toward the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, for instance, by readying the first methane regulation of the oil and gas industry. He’s also pushing the country leftward on a long-sought labor wish list by enacting a rule protecting workers from silica dust as well as by broadening access to overtime pay — measures that Democrats have been unable to push through a Republican-controlled Congress. The rules may seem arcane in many cases, but their impact is often large, prompting fierce (and in most instances unsuccessful) resistance from lawmakers.
Ever since the nation’s second president, John Adams, lame-duck presidents have used their last days in office to impose their agendas on successors. But only since George W. Bush has there been a rush to complete regulations fully six months before Election Day.
Blame the Congressional Review Act. Enacted by a newly Republican Congress in 1996 as part of Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, the CRA law gave Congress 60 legislative days after a regulation was issued to block it by using an expedited procedure.
“It’s always part of the calculation,” said Michael Hancock, former assistant administrator for policy at the Labor Department’s wage and hour division, “because it can obviously impact all of the work that’s been done on a fairly complex regulation.”
Aimed at taming the regulatory leviathan, the law proved almost entirely ineffective because presidents could — and did — routinely veto resolutions of disapproval against their own agencies’ rules. But under one circumstance, the CRA could be deadly. Late in a president’s final year, 60 legislative days (which extend much longer than calendar days) could carry over into another administration. A new president of the opposite party would be tempted to squelch a predecessor’s pet project.
That reality was brought home in March 2001, when Bush used the CRA to kill an ergonomics rule issued by Bill Clinton three months earlier. The rule, aimed at reducing repetitive-motion and other musculoskeletal hazards in the workplace, had been in the works since the presidency of Bush’s father. Declaring the rule “unduly burdensome and overly broad,” Bush sent it packing.
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