Obama Signs New Executive Order; Congress Officially Irrelevant (UPDATED)

(Update at bottom of post)

Are you ready kids?  (Whenever I say this to the RedLemur, he knows it’s gonna be bad…)

Barry Soetoro, current resident of the White House, has signed an Executive Order directing federal agencies to review regulations and produce a plan for changes to the current regulations based on the best science available.

Bye-bye Congress.

(All emphasis from this point on is the editor’s and is meant to highlight portions that require reading!!!)

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release

January 18, 2011

Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review – Executive Order

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to improve regulation and regulatory review, it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1.  General Principles of Regulation.  (a)  Our regulatory system must protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation.  It must be based on the best available science. It must allow for public participation and an open exchange of ideas.  It must promote predictability and reduce uncertainty.  It must identify and use the best, most innovative, and least burdensome tools for achieving regulatory ends.  It must take into account benefits and costs, both quantitative and qualitative.  It must ensure that regulations are accessible, consistent, written in plain language, and easy to understand.  It must measure, and seek to improve, the actual results of regulatory requirements.

(b)  This order is supplemental to and reaffirms the principles, structures, and definitions governing contemporary regulatory review that were established in Executive Order 12866 of September 30, 1993.  As stated in that Executive Order and to the extent permitted by law, each agency must, among other things:  (1) propose or adopt a regulation only upon a reasoned determination that its benefits justify its costs (recognizing that some benefits and costs are difficult to quantify); (2) tailor its regulations to impose the least burden on society, consistent with obtaining regulatory objectives, taking into account, among other things, and to the extent practicable, the costs of cumulative regulations; (3) select, in choosing among alternative regulatory approaches, those approaches that maximize net benefits (including potential economic, environmental, public health and safety, and other advantages; distributive impacts; and equity); (4) to the extent feasible, specify performance objectives, rather than specifying the behavior or manner of compliance that regulated entities must adopt; and (5) identify and assess available alternatives to direct regulation, including providing economic incentives to encourage the desired behavior, such as user fees or marketable permits, or providing information upon which choices can be made by the public.

(c)  In applying these principles, each agency is directed to use the best available techniques to quantify anticipated present and future benefits and costs as accurately as possible.  Where appropriate and permitted by law, each agency may consider (and discuss qualitatively) values that are difficult or impossible to quantify, including equity, human dignity, fairness, and distributive impacts.

Sec. 2.  Public Participation.  (a)  Regulations shall be adopted through a process that involves public participation. To that end, regulations shall be based, to the extent feasible and consistent with law, on the open exchange of information and perspectives among State, local, and tribal officials, experts in relevant disciplines, affected stakeholders in the private sector, and the public as a whole.

How did that public participation work out for us on Obamacare, Cap and Trade, and the Net Neutrality?

(b)  To promote that open exchange, each agency, consistent with Executive Order 12866 and other applicable legal requirements, shall endeavor to provide the public with an opportunity to participate in the regulatory process.  To the extent feasible and permitted by law, each agency shall afford the public a meaningful opportunity to comment through the Internet on any proposed regulation, with a comment period that should generally be at least 60 days.  To the extent feasible and permitted by law, each agency shall also provide, for both proposed and final rules, timely online access to the rulemaking docket on regulations.gov, including relevant scientific and technical findings, in an open format that can be easily searched and downloaded.  For proposed rules, such access shall include, to the extent feasible and permitted by law, an opportunity for public comment on all pertinent parts of the rulemaking docket, including relevant scientific and technical findings.

(c)  Before issuing a notice of proposed rulemaking, each agency, where feasible and appropriate, shall seek the views of those who are likely to be affected, including those who are likely to benefit from and those who are potentially subject to such rulemaking.

Sec. 3.  Integration and Innovation.  Some sectors and industries face a significant number of regulatory requirements, some of which may be redundant, inconsistent, or overlapping.  Greater coordination across agencies could reduce these requirements, thus reducing costs and simplifying and harmonizing rules.  In developing regulatory actions and identifying appropriate approaches, each agency shall attempt to promote such coordination, simplification, and harmonization.  Each agency shall also seek to identify, as appropriate, means to achieve regulatory goals that are designed to promote innovation.

Sec. 4.  Flexible Approaches.  Where relevant, feasible, and consistent with regulatory objectives, and to the extent permitted by law, each agency shall identify and consider regulatory approaches that reduce burdens and maintain flexibility and freedom of choice for the public. These approaches include warnings, appropriate default rules, and disclosure requirements as well as provision of information to the public in a form that is clear and intelligible.

I wouldn’t have expected anything less from the poseur in the White House who really truly believes he knows better than you or your elected representatives; “identify and consider…freedom of choice for the public.”

Sec. 5.  Science.  Consistent with the President’s Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies,

“Scientific Integrity” (March 9, 2009), and its implementing guidance, each agency shall ensure the objectivity of any scientific and technological information and processes used to support the agency’s regulatory actions.

Sec. 6.  Retrospective Analyses of Existing Rules.  (a)  To facilitate the periodic review of existing significant regulations, agencies shall consider how best to promote retrospective analysis of rules that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome, and to modify, streamline, expand, or repeal them in accordance with what has been learned.  Such retrospective analyses, including supporting data, should be released online whenever possible.

(b)  Within 120 days of the date of this order, each agency shall develop and submit to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs a preliminary plan, consistent with law and its resources and regulatory priorities, under which the agency will periodically review its existing significant regulations to determine whether any such regulations should be modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed so as to make the agency’s regulatory program more effective or less burdensome in achieving the regulatory objectives.

There it is folks; Congress is now irrelevant.

Sec. 7.  General Provisions.  (a)  For purposes of this order, “agency” shall have the meaning set forth in section 3(b) of Executive Order 12866.

(b)  Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:

(i) authority granted by law to a department or agency, or the head thereof; or

(ii) functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.

(c)  This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.

(d)  This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.

BARACK OBAMA

THE WHITE HOUSE,
January 18, 2011.

UPDATE:

A commentor left a note about finding out who is behind the executive orders. I am reposting an article from November 9th, 2010.

Institute for Policy Studies Pushing For Obama Executive Orders

World Net Daily is reporting that a Soros funded group, Institute for Policy Studies believes that ‘Progressives Won!’ and because they only lost three members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, they feel justified in writing as many executive orders as possible and ‘pushing’ Obama to do the right thing and sign them now that the blue-dogs have been eliminated. How’s that for some interesting circular thinking America? You must want progressive mandates because you didn’t vote Nancy and her anti-Constitutional cohorts out. Psychotropic drugs anyone?

Buck Up People…Progressives WON!

Dead weight gone. Good Riddance. The blame for the stalemate to come can now fall squarely where it belongs…on the anti-progressive, anti-democratic, anti-populist Republican members of Congress.

Our work is now finally beginning. The veil of a happy Democratic governing majority is finally lifted. We didn’t have it then; We don’t have it now. But what we do have now is a more solidly progressive bunch of Dems in Congress and a president presumably less encumbered by the false illusion that playing nice will get him a date with the other team.

Let’s throw our support unabashedly behind the Congressional Progressive Caucus and let’s push Obama to finally do the right thing through as many Executive Orders as we can present to him.

(Editor’s Note: Please remember that progressives like Soros and the groups he funds are only one agenda at the table. They aren’t the only ones playing the game of ‘Divide, Conquer, and Pillage America’. My money is still on the international central bankers who, in my opinion, are using the left and the far right to do their dirty work.)

Soros group wants Obama to rule by executive order

Organization cites mid-terms, claims progressives registered victory

NEW YORK – It was progressives who won the mid-term elections, particularly incumbents in a socialist-founded congressional caucus that emerged from last week’s ballots virtually unscathed, boasted an article published by the George Soros-funded Institute for Policy Studies, a Marxist-oriented think-tank in Washington, D.C.

The article recommends that President Obama govern from executive order to push through a progressive agenda.

“Progressives won in the 2010 mid-term elections,” wrote Karen Dolan, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, or IPS, and director of the Cities for Progress and Cities for Peace projects based at the radical organization.

“The Congressional Progressive Caucus, the largest caucus in the House Democratic Caucus at over 80 members, emerged virtually unscathed, losing only three members,” she wrote, in the piece published on the IPS website.

“By contrast, the conservative Blue Dog Democratic caucus was more than sliced in half from 54 members to only 26. Further, of the 34 conservative Dems who voted against Obama’s Healthcare Reform, a mere 12 won re-election,” she wrote.

Dolan declared that “our work is now finally beginning.”

“The veil of a happy Democratic governing majority is finally lifted. We didn’t have it then; We don’t have it now. But what we do have now is a more solidly progressive bunch of Dems in Congress and a president presumably less encumbered by the false illusion that playing nice will get him a date with the other team.”

She went on to recommend that progressives “throw our support unabashedly behind the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and let’s push Obama to finally do the right thing through as many Executive Orders as we can present to him.”

WND reported the Congressional Progressive Caucus was founded by the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA.

Institute for Policy Studies

• America’s oldest leftwing think tank
• Has long supported Communist and anti-American causes around the world

The Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) was founded in 1963 as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization with seed money (derived from a fortune made in cosmetics sales under the Faberge trade name) from the Samuel Rubin Foundation. Samuel Rubin (1901-1978) was a Russian Bolshevik and the father of Cora Weiss, who headed the Samuel Rubin Foundation from its inception and is currently the principal financier of IPS. Weiss’ husband, Peter, is Chairman of the IPS Board of Trustees. He is also a member of the National Lawyers Guild and the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee, both of which were created as Communist Party fronts. The Weisses selected Richard J. Barnet and Marcus Raskin to be the first co-directors of IPS, with the aim of transforming the United States by altering public attitudes, changing laws, and reversing foreign policy through an Academy that reached every nexus of the national nervous system.

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