GOP Freshmen Hour
Floor Speech
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Mrs. ROBY. I thank the gentleman from Colorado and the other Members that are here tonight to talk about the Red Tape Reduction and Small Business Job Creation Act that we will be voting on here in the House this week.
Earlier this month, President Obama commented in a speech:
If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen.
President Obama has even talked about how excessive regulation hurts job creation saying that:
Sometimes rules have gotten out of balance placing unreasonable burdens on business, burdens that have stifled innovation, and it's had a chilling effect on the growth of jobs.
This is straight from this President's and this administration's mouth. Even as recently as February of 2012, The Economist put out this, ``The Over-regulated America.'' This is not a secret that we are talking about here tonight. This is something that is clearly well established. And if any Member of Congress has taken, as I know many have, the time to travel throughout their districts, as we all do, to meet with business owners, small businesses, medium-sized businesses or even large businesses, they will tell you that they are not creating jobs because they are overregulated. And I have used example after example on this very floor where I have met with the private sector, with these businesses, and they've said we had to reinvest all of our capital into just making sure that we are dotting the I and crossing the T, when all of that capital could be reinvested in creating jobs.
So what we have on this floor this week is a series of bills. I know Mr. Quayle from Arizona is here to talk about his incorporation in this bill, but there are seven different ideas incorporated into this one bill that is going to ease regulations in this country on businesses in different ways. I think tonight, as the gentleman from Colorado has already suggested, we can have a real frank discussion, because this is about being honest with the American people.
I get asked the question, as I'm sure all of you do, what are you doing? What is Congress doing? Well, this is what we're doing. And why our friends in the Senate, for the life of me, I do not understand, nor do the people I represent in southeast Alabama understand, why Mr. Reid and those in the Senate will not take up these very bills that will remove the heavy hand of government and unleash the private sector's ability to create jobs in this country. I look forward to continuing this conversation, and thanks for letting me be here.
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Mrs. ROBY. Just to jump in real quick, have you heard from your employers back in the district where you go and you do these site visits and they immediately tell you not just how overregulated they are but how excited the regulators are to come into their business and write them up for things they have never done before? In the past, these regulators have been ambitious to help job creators to correct situations that may be unsafe or a dangerous situation for the employees. But, now, instead of providing employers an opportunity, there are fines after fines after fines that are just putting more of a burden on these very people that want to take their capital and invest in job creation. I hear it everywhere I go.
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Mrs. ROBY. I would love to add to the out-of-whack statement because I have a few examples here.
I don't know if you have agriculture in your districts, but the farmer that is having to deal with duplicative permitting processes or concerns over the Federal Government making them regulate dust on their farm. As one of our
colleagues said, last time she checked, if you drive a pickup truck down a dirt road, it's going to generate dust. But we're regulating that. That's what the Federal Government is regulating.
Not to mention ObamaCare or the pulp and paper industry--which we have a lot of in my district--concerned about the Boiler MACT regulations that are so costly, the gas station owners that are worried about EPA requiring that their gasoline have certain percentages of ethanol mixed into their fuel or they have to pay a penalty, or the chicken hatchery farmer--now, this is a good one that happened last week.
We had a chicken hatchery farmer that called our office just last week about a new regulation that will require keeping his eggs at a certain temperature to go to processing to make dried eggs to avoid salmonella. Well, here's the kicker. And this is just to demonstrate the ridiculousness of the overregulation.
On the surface, this makes sense because we want to protect America's health. But this same regulation, this very same regulation, is letting the grade egg farmers that do have potential salmonella in their facilities send their possible contaminated eggs to the same processing plants. Processing eggs for dried eggs and other products kills the salmonella that would potentially be in this product. The FDA is allowing possible exposed eggs into the system.
So why should a hatchery farmer, who only sells to this type of processing when they have extra eggs be forced to put it all in a sort of refrigeration process that has nothing to do with the prevention that the regulation says that it's trying to prevent? And the answer is overregulation. This is just another example. I like eggs. I fixed some scrambled eggs this morning for breakfast. This affects me. It affects all of us in our lives, in our homes, in the grocery store.
When I buy milk for my kids, I see the costs increasing because of these very regulations. Whether it's the EPA and the ethanol in the gas or these actual very specific regulations that have to do specifically with the product being sold, we all are affected by this. It's costing jobs, and it's costing the American taxpayer to have to spend dollars that are unnecessary.
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Mrs. ROBY. I would even add to that and say that I've had business owners in my district who have lodged complaints about what we talked about before, this punitive regulation, but they don't want you to go to bat for them because they're afraid it's only going to end up costing them more and that then their businesses will become targets of this Federal Government.
Now, what kind of United States of America is that when we have businesses that are afraid to complain to their Representatives in Congress about exactly what you're talking about? ``Hi, I'm here. I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'' Then you complain about it, and you get targeted as a business.
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Mrs. ROBY. To quickly add to that, in the Dodd-Frank Act, there are 36 rules implemented, and it will grow to the 400 required under that act. That goes to your point exactly.
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Mrs. ROBY. Didn't you have the opportunity to question a witness on your committee and ask very specifically as it relates to energy? If I watched the hearing correctly, you were unable to ever get really until the final admittance that, in fact, they do not take economic impact into consideration when instituting these regulations.
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Mrs. ROBY. Wouldn't that be a novel idea?
Just real quickly if I may. We've now stated on more than one occasion some quotes from the President and this administration going back to the fact that if you've got a business, you didn't build that. Then, as the gentleman from Colorado just read again, the President said that these rules have gotten out of balance. Mr. Griffin in his op ed he wrote in support of his amendment. I'm just going to make sure we give the gentleman from Arkansas some credit since he's not standing here with us. He also points out at the end of this opinion piece that the President admitted in his State of the Union address, ``There's no question that some regulations are outdated, unnecessary, or too costly.''
And I just want to read that again. ``There's no question''--this is the President, this President, President Obama--``There's no question that some regulations are outdated, unnecessary, and too costly.'' Yet every single time in my short tenure in this House of Representatives that we have brought a bill to the floor to deregulate, to do away with unnecessary regulations so that the private sector can grow, we are blocked in the Senate, and the President is not there to support us.
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