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(Note: The Obama Chart is interactive at www.ObamaChart.com For a detailed and updated account read Democracy Denied: How Obama is Ignoring You and Bypassing Congress to Radically Transform America -- and How to Stop Him by Phil Kerpen, Vice President for Policy, Americans For Prosperity. )

When the American people headed to the voting booth on November 2, 2010 they thought they were putting an end to President Obama’s "radical transformation" of America. They were wrong … Unfortunately, for decades Congress has been delegating away its legislative power to bureaucratic agencies that Obama is now using to bypass Congress and the American people and pursue his agenda. He must be stopped.

Cap-and-trade is a government scheme to put an artificial price on greenhouse gas emissions. …Cap-and-trade is the environmental extremists’ attempt to disguise their agenda using market language that Americans are comfortable hearing. However, over the past several years the scheme has been exposed for what it really is: a huge energy tax.

House: On June 26, 2009, the U.S. House of Representatives passed … the Waxman-Markey energy tax bill, which was built around a cap-and-trade program. The bill passed by a narrow seven-vote margin, despite significant bipartisan opposition. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported the bill would grow government by $864 billion.

Senate: The Senate has not taken a floor vote on cap-and-trade since President Obama took office. The House-passed Waxman-Markey bill was never seriously considered in the Senate during the 111th Congress.

Advocates of so-called "net neutrality" have been ringing alarm bells for years that without drastic government intervention to "save the Internet" the phone and cable companies will disrupt Internet service. The proposed solution to this nonexistent problem sounds simple--force phone and cable companies to treat every bit of information the same way … "Net neutrality" would make it illegal to prioritize traffic. Networks cost billions of dollars to build and maintain, and if there is uncertainty whether there will be a good return on that investment, private investment will dry up. And then government will step in, spending billions of our tax dollars on a government-owned and controlled Internet.

House: On July 31, 2009 Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) introduced … legislation that would impose onerous so-called nondiscrimination regulations on both the public Internet and private computer networks. The legislation was written in close cooperation with … avowed Marxist Robert McChesney, who has said: "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet. But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control." The bill attracted only 27 co-sponsors and has gained no momentum in the House.

Senate: …Legislation to impose "net neutrality" … most recently was S. 215 in 2007. … The bill attracted only 11 co-sponsors. One of them was then-Senator Barack Obama. The bill was not introduced in the Senate at all in the 111th Congress.

FCC: Like other parts of his agenda, when President Obama’s Internet regulations failed through the democratic process he turned to an executive agency to implement them through the backdoor. …The FCC started a rulemaking process for net neutrality in Fall 2009. Their jurisdiction to proceed in this way, however, was challenged in court.

• Courts: On April 6, 2010, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals issued its long-awaited ruling in Comcast v. FCC, stating that the FCC did not have authority to regulate the Internet. In a stinging 36-page decision, the court found the FCC lacked any jurisdiction.

Net Neutrality: The FCC ignored Congress, the courts, and the American people and on December 21, 2010 voted on a 3-2 party-line vote to impose potentially devastating regulations on the up-to-now free market Internet. The solution is clear. Congress must make it a top priority to overturn these regulations …, preferably with a Congressional Review Act Resolution of Disapproval that can avoid filibuster and cleanly invalidate the order.

Organized labor’s top priority is the astonishingly misnamed Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), under which workers would lose the protection of secret ballots for union organizing elections … Less noticed, but possibly even worse for the U.S. economy, is that EFCA also takes the "bargaining" out of collective bargaining by empowering a federal bureaucrat to set contract terms for wages, benefits, and working conditions without so much as a vote of the workers.

House: The Employee Free Choice Act …. When it last came up for a vote, it passed the House 241-185 on March 1, 2007. Given strong Republican opposition it is clear that the 2010 midterm election was a repudiation of EFCA, which could no longer pass the House.

Senate: The Employee Free Choice Act has never passed the Senate. … The 2010 midterm election further slammed the door.

Becker: After EFCA failed in Congress, organized labor and the Obama administration turned its attention to a backdoor attempt to accomplish many of the bill’s objectives … by recess appointing Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board. Becker is associate general counsel to both the SEIU and AFL-CIO. … Becker has written that "employers should be stripped of any legally cognizable interest in their employees’ election of representatives." His appointment was opposed because he would use the NLRB to implement EFCA by the backdoor.

• Senate: During the two weeks after Senator Brown (R-Mass.) won his landmark special election, the Obama administration and organized labor pressed for a cloture vote on Becker’s appointment. ... Becker got only 52 votes when 60 were required.

Recess: On March 27, 2010, President Obama installed Becker on the NLRB as a recess appointment, ignoring the Senate. Congress emphatically rejected card check by the front door (EFCA legislation) and by the back door [Becker unconfirmed] … Obama’s double bypass of Congress by recess-appointing Becker was a huge slap in the face to the American people...

E-Voting: Becker wasted little time moving forward on his card-check agenda without Congressional approval. The NLRB under Becker is threatening to sue four states to overturn their state constitutional secret ballot protections. … And the NLRB under Becker is even proposing "electronic remote voting" that would take away private ballot rights and conduct elections on the Internet. … Congress must step in and protect workers. Jim DeMint has introduced legislation, S. 217, the Secret Ballot Protection Act, that would protect workers from Craig Becker’s backdoor card-check attempts.

We must make one thing clear to Congress:

ObamaCare is an abomination. The bill that was passed into law was not even finished legislation… That jumbled mess is now being arbitrarily interpreted by unelected bureaucrats who are making a bad bill even worse.

HHS: HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius … was given frighteningly vast powers by the new law. … Sebelius is now issuing a series of "guidances" and regulations that exploit these new powers.

• HHS has discretion to issue waivers from the requirements of ObamaCare, … Of the initial 733 waivers that have been granted, a huge number are for the labor unions whose political contributions and organizing helped pass the law.
• One of the first major regulatory actions under the new … was supposed to make good on the president’s promise that "if you like your plan, you can keep it." Instead it did the opposite: it forced about 80 percent of small businesses to lose the coverage they have now.

Berwick: Dr. Donald Berwick is a big-government health care extremist, nominated by Obama to run Medicare. Berwick said of the British system: "Cynics beware, I am romantic about the National Health Service; I love it. …."

Not only does he love rationing, but he rhapsodizes about politicizing health care decisions.

• Senate: Given Berwick’s controversial views, Senate Democrats did not schedule a single hearing on his appointment to head Medicare, let alone schedule a vote …

Recess: President Obama circumvented the Senate and the American public by using a recess appointment to install Dr. Donald Berwick at the helm of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. It …exposes the frightening big government extremism of the president’s health care agenda.

Rationing: Berwick has said: "The decision is not whether we will ration care. The decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open." Obama’s new health care boss … openly [supports] giving the government centralized control over health care. Berwick specifically looks to the National Institute for Clinical Excellence in Britain as a model … If you’re too old or too sick to justify the cost, you’re denied treatment.

Phone calls are best and you can reach your senator through the Senate switchboard at 202-224-3121.
If you can’t get through on the phone, an e-mail form has been set up on this issue here:
http://www.capwiz.com/americansforprosperity/issues/alert/?alertid=21851616&type=CO

The lead Senate sponsor of the disastrous Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill was Senator Dodd, who … made clear that this monstrous bill – over 2300 pages – was packed full of regulatory unknowns. He said: "No one will know until this is actually in place how it works."

243 Rules: According to the Wall Street Journal: "Dodd-Frank, with its 2,300 pages, will unleash the biggest wave of new federal financial rule-making in three generations… the law will require no fewer than 243 new formal rule-makings by 11 different federal agencies. ... The new rules will run into the hundreds if not thousands of pages in the Federal Register, laying out in detail what your neighborhood banker, hedge fund manager or derivatives trader can and cannot do."

• Bailouts: The impetus behind the Dodd-Frank bill was purportedly to end "too big to fail;" however, the bill does no such thing. … This admission that "too big to fail" is still part of the government’s strategy institutionalizes moral hazard and threatens a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis.

Warren: A Harvard professor, Elizabeth Warren led the TARP oversight panel away from its intended purpose of exercising oversight toward radical policy changes, including nationalization of the banks. Dodd-Frank created a new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a powerful new agency that can regulate every consumer financial transaction and it largely outsight of congressional oversight, because it’s funded directly by the Federal Reserve.

Warren became a darling of the left and their favorite to head the new agency.

Senate: Elizabeth Warren had no chance of being confirmed in the Senate. Dodd himself said she was too radical. No Republicans offered support for her nomination. In fact, Obama never even nominated her.

Czar: When it was clear Warren was too extreme to be confirmed by the Senate, Obama skipped the Senate by appointing her not the head of the new agency, but a special White House staffer – a czar – charged with creating the new agency …We now have an unconfirmed, unaccountable czar overseeing the creation of a new agency with vast regulatory power that is not even subject to congressional oversight through appropriations, because it is funded by the Federal Reserve.

H.R. 10: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=h112-10

Dear Senator Paul and Representative Davis,

On behalf of more than 1.5 million Americans for Prosperity activists in all 50 states, thank you for introducing the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act – S. 299 and H.R. 10. The REINS Act would begin to restore Congress’s proper role in the construction of rules that govern the country by requiring executive agencies to submit major rulemaking proposals to Congress for review and a clear up-or-down vote before the rules take effect.

Estimates show that every year between 80 and 85 major rules—rules with an impact of more than $100 million—are implemented by executive agencies with no vote by elected officials. It is time to inject accountability into the rulemaking process and require agencies to bring these major rulemakings before the People’s duly-elected representatives.

Executive agencies obviously serve an important role in the creation of the complex rules that govern our society. Congressional delegation of authority is required so that agency experts can take the necessary time to study relevant issues and produce thoughtful rules. Additionally, the public comment process is crucial because it allows stakeholders to advise executive agencies on how to make rules that accomplish agency goals while still allowing regulated entities to function.

However, the often clandestine agency process should not be without congressional input. The Congressional Review Act was an excellent first step toward ensuring agencies do not vastly overreach their authority. But the CRA is reactive and requires that Congress sift through thousands of regulations searching for objectionable rules. By removing some of the previously delegated authority, the REINS Act would reverse this procedure and require agencies to report major rules and request authority to implement them.

It is time for Congress to reassert its proper role in the rulemaking process and rescind this portion of previously delegated authority. Thank you again for introducing S. 299 and H.R. 10, the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny Act.

Sincerely,

James Valvo
Director of Government Affairs
Americans for Prosperity

S. 299: http://prosperityactions.com/siteapps/advocacy/BillDetails.aspx?b=6074229&c=5oJELSPwFhJWG&BillID=1058542

H.R.10: http://prosperityactions.com/siteapps/advocacy/BillDetails.aspx?b=6074229&c=5oJELSPwFhJWG&BillID=1041756