In the last two weeks of 2014, the Obama administration churned out so many new final rules, proposed rules, notices documents and presidential directives that the Federal Register was struggling to get them all published. All told, the Competitive Enterprise Institute tabulated 3,541 new rules and regulations issued by Obama during 2014. Congress only passed 129 new laws last year, meaning but Obama’s administration created about 27 new regulations and rules for each law Congress passed. Yep, The Boy Who Would be King trumped Congress in the bureaucratic race to write new regulations. It’s so unbelievable, you may want to go to the Regulations.gov source to see for yourself President Obama’s latest abomination.

The American Action Forum estimated that the regulatory cost for the new edicts would exceed $200 billion, if the Environmental Protection Agency’s coal ash rule and its $20 billion price tag are included. But hold on — we’re not done. Obama also creates more laws behind the scenes, without congressional involvement. Bureaucrats and regulators, not Congress, now dictate most of the nation’s laws. Obama uses and abuses “executive actions” to drum up new laws, bypassing Congress and snubbing the U.S. Constitution’s doctrine of separation of powers. Let’s hope that the new Congress will quash Obama’s abusive use of executive actions and retrieve its rightful constitutional powers.

To nauseate you even more, The Daily Caller reported that “the Obama administration will be unleashing a slew of new regulations in 2015 … that will cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars [more].”

This horrific pile of costly new laws and regulations cements the hard left’s conviction that rather than eliminating a root problem, it’s better to create a new regulation instead. Call it the creed of the leftist bureaucrat. After all, the more rules and regulations, the more the bureaucrat corps gets to expand and hire more people, and the more fines they can collect from Americans and companies trying to pick their way through the minefield of laws in this country.

So it’s a happy New Year for the president as he basks in his thousands of new rules. Of course, he was not in the White House to celebrate, since he was also basking in the Hawaiian sun and living like royalty on his 16-day vacation. On your dime. The trip cost taxpayers over $4 million, a relief from the $7 million cost of the first family’s 2012 holiday vacation.  But I digress.

No one should be surprised about the huge number of new regulations from this administration. Like scat in the snow, leftists mark their trail of tell-tale actions with reams of new regulations. Obama, the self-anointed emperor of the leftists, continues as trail leader, setting the example.

Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is the prime tree-killer, with 3,100 regulations since 2009 that are 43 times longer than the Bible, according to Newsmax. In that time, the EPA published nearly 28 million words on almost 28,000 Federal Register pages. For the younger set’s understanding, EPA rules sport 25 times as many words as the seven Harry Potter books.

In the 2013 fiscal year, our federal government imposed 10.3 billion hours of compliance paperwork. According to the American Action Forum, “It would take more than 750,000 employees working full-time to complete the annual paperwork added since 2010.” The president crows that his deregulatory measures have reduced red tape and paperwork, but they have actually resulted in over $10 billion in new net costs and 1.5 billion new paperwork hours.

The 2015 Congress can do the productive segment of the American population a big favor by taking a broadsword to the executive branch’s violations of the Constitution’s checks and balances, slashing the administration’s mission creep, regulatory overreach and egregious spending.

• Author
• Recent Posts

John R. Smith

John R. Smith is chairman of BIZPAC, the Business Political Action Committee of Palm Beach County, and owner of a financial services company. He is a frequent columnist for BizPac Review.

Latest posts by John R. Smith (see all)

• John Kerry may be the most incompetent Secretary of State in living memory - June 8, 2021
• Earth Day: A creature of global socialists - April 21, 2021
• Mainstream media becomes destructive force to society - April 20, 2021

Comment

We have no tolerance for comments containing violence, racism, profanity, vulgarity, doxing, or discourteous behavior. If a comment is spam, instead of replying to it please click the ∨ icon below and to the right of that comment. Thank you for partnering with us to maintain fruitful conversation.