Monthly Archives: August 2011

Congress and the White House have typically been reluctant to repeal any laws or regulations, regardless of which party is in power. The solution? Change the institutional rules of the game to give them an incentive to repeal laws. CEI Research Associate Jacque Otto and I expound on that idea in The American Spectator.

One reform would be a Repeal Amendment to the Constitution. That would give states a veto power over federal laws if two thirds of them vote for repeal. Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett has already drafted some language:

Any provision of law or regulation of the United States may be repealed by the several states, and such repeal shall be effective when the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states approve resolutions for this purpose that particularly describe the same provision or provisions of law or regulation to be repealed.

We have other ideas:

Short of that, the House and Senate could establish repeal committees. These committees would be unable to pass laws and regulations, only to repeal them. Its members would be ineligible to sit on other committees. The only accomplishments they would be able to tout to voters would be how much they lighten Washington’s heavy hand.

Another option is to add an automatic sunset provision to all new regulations — meaning that they would expire after, say, five years unless specifically reauthorized by Congress. This kind of regulatory expiration date would ensure that only the truly necessary ones stay in the books.

Read the whole thing here.