Mr. Chairman: HR 1022 is regulation by strangulation. If you think government red tape has been tied in knots, just wait until you experience the results of this Republican red flag against public health and safety and the environment.
The cumbersome imposition of regulations on top of regulations will only serve to delay approval of anything to protect public health and safety and the environment. The resulting delay will threaten the lives of many and the future of all Americans. In our daily lives, the delay will translate into unregulated food and chemical products and in the longer term, the risk will be the loss of our natural patrimony.
Once again, the Contract is placing financial interests over the interests of American public. A CNN/Time poll taken at the end of January determined that Americans consider environmental protection "one of the most important problems" (23%) or "very important" (65%). Only 23% of the people surveyed believed that protection from pollution had "gone too far."
The "risk" in risk assessment is great. You cannot put a price on preventing illness, saving lives or preserving natural lands. Common sense should be brought to this debate on dollars and cents. A petroleum industry official had this comment about HR 1022: "This reminds of 1981, when the industry shot itself in the foot...Business not only lost but managed to engender much of the strident public environmental sentiment that later resulted in far stricter laws."
HR 1022 does not discriminate between regulations -- ones where the process should be re-examined or streamlined and ones that should be eliminated. The indiscriminate overriding of existing protections throws out the good with the bad.
Like other components of the Republican regulatory reform package, HR 1022 represents another opportunity for special interests to paralyze the federal regulatory process at the expense of average, tax-paying Americans.
In this case, Mr. Chairman, less government means more government. The layers of bureaucracy that will be added to the regulatory process by HR 1022 will put more lives in harm's way. If you want to vote for more government and less public health and environmental protection, then you have the right bill in front of you. If you want to vote for government reform, you will need to look elsewhere.
I urge my colleagues to vote for less government -- vote no on HR 1022.
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