By encouraging a public debate about the erosion of Congressional power, Mike Lee hopes to protect Ryan’s agenda from being pummeled by the president.
Do you see those stacks of papers over there?” Just pointing won’t suffice for Senator Mike Lee. He gets up from his chair and walks over to a wooden cabinet in the corner of his office. The shelves are filled with stacks of white paper. My eyes settle on one of the thicker sheaves, which has a red bow on top. He notices.
“No, no, not the one with the bow. That’s the omnibus.” He picks up a 400-page pile, only a few inches tall. It comprises all of the laws Congress passed in 2014.
The second stack — over 80,000 pages, around eleven feet high — he can’t hold. It’s the 2014 federal register, which contains all federal regulations to date.
“This should give you a sense of the problem.” In Lee’s estimation, the imbalance between the two stacks is indicative of how much lawmaking power Congress has ceded to the executive branch.
He sees a body of lawmakers unwilling to make the “tough choices” that are their rightful responsibility, and peppering their bills with phrases such as “the Secretary shall determine” that pass the buck to a cabinet agency all too willing to take it.
It’s the reason, for instance, regulations continue to pour out of Dodd-Frank: Through the creation of the Financial Stability Oversight Council, Congress left all discretion over whether a bank has gotten too big to the Treasury secretary, rather than outlining a metric itself.
Complaints about executive overreach have recently become common among Republicans on Capitol Hill — in the agenda he announced last week, Speaker Paul Ryan deemed restoring the separation of powers a top priority for 2016 and beyond — but Lee has been quietly launching an offensive against what he deems “the foremost inadequacy of Congress” for nearly a year.
He’s worked the halls of both chambers since March to garner support for his “Article I Project,” or “A1P” for short. The Utah senator envisions the project as an “in-house think tank” where legislators identify instances in which congressional authority has been usurped and devise ways to reclaim it.
He’s already convinced allies such as Senator Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.) to back the idea, and his team is readying for a glossy rollout: Lee will announce the project in a February 3 speech at Hillsdale’s Kirby Center, and later in an op-ed with Representative Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas).
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Source: Mike Lee: Congress Must Reclaim Authority from President
When Senators stand up for the separation of powers, we need to support them. Whether the President is Democrat or Republican, be he Obama or Trump, the Presidency should not be making laws. The U.S. Constitution very clearly states that all laws must originate in Congress. Unfortunately, far too many Senators and Congressmen are not willing to make the hard decisions and write their bills leaving the implementation and how it will work up to the Cabinet level Secretary involved. This leaves most of the power of Washington in the hands of UNELECTED bureaucrats who write rules that are treated as law across the land. Federal overreach is inevitable when Congress abdicates its responsibilities.