MacIver News Service | February 26, 2016
[Madison, Wisc…] House Speaker Paul Ryan is planning to fight back against what he describes as unprecedented overreaches by an increasingly brazen federal bureaucracy under President Obama.Ryan said bureaucrats in federal agencies are effectively writing their own laws, bypassing Congress and creating what he called a “fourth branch of government.” The American public has no say in burdensome rules that directly impact them because Congress has been usurped by federal agencies that feel empowered to disregard the legislature’s role in lawmaking, he said.
“We can’t have an executive that thinks that he can just keep going it alone and write laws himself. The executive branch is not the law-writing branch of government, the legislative branch is,” Ryan told the MacIver Institute.
A major part of the conservative agenda Ryan and Congressional Republicans plan to roll out this spring deals with the growing power of executive agencies. One measure, called the REINS Act (Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act), would require burdensome regulations to be approved by Congress before they can go into effect.