A Congressional Review Act ‘Game-Changer’ Steps into the Spotlight

In a new video, Pacific Legal Foundation’s Todd Gaziano talks with Jonathan Wood about a new interpretation of the Congressional Review Act that would allow Congress to quickly repeal federal regulations from as far back as the mid-1990s.

Traditionally considered to apply only to recently-passed rules, Gaziano’s game-changing theory of a more expansive application of the Congressional Review Act was recently featured in Kim Strassel’s Wall Street Journal column:

The accepted wisdom in Washington is that the CRA can be used only against new regulations, those finalized in the past 60 legislative days. That gets Republicans back to June, teeing up 180 rules or so for override. Included are biggies like the Interior Department’s “streams” rule, the Labor Department’s overtime-pay rule, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s methane rule.

But what Mr. Gaziano told Republicans on Wednesday was that the CRA grants them far greater powers, including the extraordinary ability to overrule regulations even back to the start of the Obama administration. The CRA also would allow the GOP to dismantle these regulations quickly, and to ensure those rules can’t come back, even under a future Democratic president. No kidding.

You can read more about this new effort at Red Tape Rollback, a project of the Pacific Legal Foundation. My colleague Wayne Crews’ most recent column for Forbes also features some excellent CRA-relevant analysis.