President Obama’s mountain of new regulations and avoidance of congressional demands like building the Keystone XL oil pipeline is doing wonders for the legacy of Jimmy Carter, long considered the worst modern-day president.
“I used to say this is as serious as things were since 1980,” said Ed Meese, attorney general under Ronald Reagan, who beat Carter that year. “I think they are worse now,” he told Washington Secrets. “At least President Carter obeyed the Constitution and here you have a president who disregards the Constitution, that’s the most charitable way to say it,” said Meese. “He has relieved Jimmy Carter of a great precedent and that’s being the worst president in history,” he laughed, then added with a smile, “don’t quote me on that.”
Meese joined other Republicans this week to decry the administration’s use of new regulations to push environmental, labor and manufacturing policy while avoiding the demands of Congress, which has tied some of Obama’s agenda in knots. “We’re becoming more and more like Europe,” added Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, at a conference organized by Crossroads GPS and American Action Network to draw attention to how regulations could threaten the economy.
While the one-day conference touched on Obama’s ‘dissing of Congress over Keystone and recent recess appointments, the wave of regulations was the hot topic. “It’s worse than I’ve ever seen in my 20 years in Washington,” said Randy Johnson, senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill., arrived with facts and figures: 2011 brought 82,000 pages of new regulations that could cost businesses $232 billion. This year alone, the administration has published 7,500 pages of new regulations costing business $13 billion.
“That has a cascading effect,” said Roskam. He added that there are 3,100 pages of regulations pending in the system, and “we’re not talking about what kinds of pencils the FAA would like to have.”
