


Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) has reworked her massive regulatory reform legislation in an effort to fit it into reconciliation, although the Senate parliamentarian will have the final say.
Cammack spoke to the Washington Examiner this week about her effort to overhaul her bill, the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny, or REINS, Act, which would prevent the executive branch from implementing major rules unless they are reviewed and approved by Congress.
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Cammack said that after much work, the language has been refocused in order to comply with the strict “Byrd rule” guidelines of reconciliation, a legislative process that allows bills to bypass the filibuster and pass with only a simple majority in the Senate. Republicans aim to use the process to pass a massive fiscal bill that would extend the Trump tax cuts.
And Cammack was at least victorious in getting the reworked REINS Act included in the House Judiciary Committee’s portion of the reconciliation bill.
Specifically, Cammack said that while she wasn’t particularly thrilled about the change, they narrowed the definition of “major rules” in the legislation to better mesh with the Byrd rule, which requires reconciliation to focus solely on fiscal issues and allows a senator to raise a point of order if they believe there is “extraneous matter” in the bill.
The new language would require that every new “major rule that increases revenues” proposed by agencies be approved by Congress before going into effect.
The previous iteration of REINS described a “major rule” as any federal rule or regulation that would cause an annual economic effect in excess of $100 million, a major increase in consumer prices, or adverse effects on competition, employment, and investment, among other criteria.
Cammack said she wasn’t particularly thrilled with narrowing the definition of major rules, but acknowledged it was necessary to pass the Byrd rule.
“Narrowing the definition of major rules to include direct impact to revenue, because that is a fundamental test of the ‘Byrd bath,’” Cammack said, referring to the process in which extraneous measures are stripped out of reconciliation legislation. “And so narrowing that was a key portion.”
Cammack explained that a lot of work went into reworking the language to allow REINS to be included in reconciliation.
“So for, I would say, almost eight months at this point, we have been working to — and I hate the term — but reimagine REINS, because in its original O.G. form, it wasn’t Byrd-compliant,” Cammack said.
Still, the plan to rein in federal rulemaking could still meet with disapproval by the Senate parliamentarian and be excluded from the final reconciliation bill.
But this could be Republicans’ best shot yet to get REINS passed into law. That is because, while the GOP holds the White House and majorities in the House and Senate, the REINS Act couldn’t pass the Senate as a stand-alone bill because Republicans don’t have a filibuster-proof 60-vote majority.
Cammack also said the stakes of her legislation for the future of the country are huge. She asserted that passing REINS would be bigger than even making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent, which is the main goal of reconciliation.
“This is a multigenerational change,” Cammack said. “This is a realignment of culture in Washington. This is bigger than any other element, in my opinion, than anything else in reconciliation.”
Some outside groups have been pushing for big regulatory reform like REINS.
Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told the Washington Examiner that this would give Congress more power over unelected bureaucrats, who have been able to wield outsize influence through rulemaking.
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“The reason this is an important issue is right now, agencies who are said to be undemocratic and unaccountable can issue major rules with very little cost-benefit scrutiny,” Crews said.
Crews also said reconciliation affords Republicans a key moment to get major rulemaking reform passed. He pointed out that the REINS Act has already passed the House multiple times, but because of the filibuster, it has never passed the Senate.