As with many fellow Swamp denizens, on any given Sunday morning between 10:30 and 11:30 Eastern, “Meet the Press” is on my home office TV while I work to get a jump on the coming week. Yet after last week’s episode, that was not the case this past Sunday, nor will it be on any future Sunday.
Why will I no longer tune into the 70-year-old program? It’s not because the show and its guests tilt to the Left, that’s to be expected. It’s because last week it became clear that the show is making its viewers dumber. I can stomach biased news, consider the source, and take it for what it is worth. What I can’t suffer is an hour-long program that manages to make people who watch it less informed.
Take what happened on last Sunday’s program, when host Chuck Todd spent a considerable portion of the show focusing on the FBI investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians in the lead up to the 2016 election.
Todd described Congress as being consumed with the Mueller probe. Andrea Mitchell echoed her NBC colleague’s talking points, explaining that Washington is in complete gridlock due to the FBI investigation, unable to focus on other matters, let alone actually accomplish anything.
There is no doubt that the FBI investigation is a major distraction from more pressing policy matters. That is a feature, not a bug, for those stoking the investigation and cheering it on.
The real news that was brought to light on last Sunday’s “Meet the Press” is that Todd and Mitchell don’t seem to be following what is actually happening in Congress, despite that being a core function of their highly-paid jobs.
Were Todd and Mitchell actually paying attention, they would have noticed that rather than being in “complete gridlock,” as Mitchell put it, Congress actually enacted a major reform last week setting a landmark precedent that could allow Congress to repeal a host of federal regulations that have been on the books for decades.
You won’t hear about this on the Sunday shows, so I’ll tell you what happened.
Four days before Todd and Mitchell bemoaned how Congress was in total gridlock, Republicans on the Hill repealed the auto-lending discrimination rule issued by the Obama administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which at the time was run by Rob Cordray, who is now running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in Ohio.
Cordray used this rule, which flew in the face of the provision in Dodd-Frank that explicitly prohibits the CFPB from regulating auto-lending, to bully lenders into paying millions of dollars in damages for alleged racial discrimination that was justified using junk science and bureaucratic guesswork.
On April 18, the dubious auto-rule was repealed by Congress through its authority under the Congressional Review Act, the law approved by President Bill Clinton in 1996 that has been used to repeal more than a dozen Obama-era regulations since President Trump took office. The CRA allows Congress to repeal a regulation up to 60 legislative days (not calendar days) after the rule has been reported to both chambers of Congress, as is required in order for a rule to take effect.
The auto-lender rule was issued in 2013, well beyond the 60-day window that Congress has to use its CRA authority to repeal a regulation. However, Congress was still able to repeal the auto-lender “rule” because Cordray’s CFPB never reported it to Congress as an official rule; he instead issued it as “guidance” intended to carry the same weight as an actual rule.
Unfortunately for Cordray, but fortunately for the economy, the United States Government Accountability Office ruled in December of last year that since the CFPB auto-lender rule was guidance that carried the weight of a rule, Congress could use the CRA to repeal it within 60 legislative days of that GAO ruling, which is what subsequently occurred in the week that Todd and Mitchell proclaimed that nothing happened in Congress.
This is big. Scrapping the dubious auto-lender rule was a great move by Congress, but this precedent makes clear that Congress can also use the CRA to repeal other regulations that have been on the books long past the CRA’s 60-day window for repeal, either because they were issued as guidance, as was the case with the now defunct CFPB auto-lender rule, or because their were never reported to Congress as required by law.
This, my friends, is huge. As Phil Kerpen, CEO of American Committment, explained on Twitter, this proves that Congress can use its CRA authority to repeal “guidance” that was never formally reported to Congress as a rule. This opens many long-standing, decades-old federal regulations up for congressional repeal.
3. This proves the CRA can be used to overturn “guidance” that was never reported to Congress. This was a 2013 rule, but still in the CRA window because no report was sent to start the clock.
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) April 18, 2018
That wasn’t the only major congressional accomplishment that occurred the week that Todd and Mitchell claimed Congress was at a stand still. That week the House of Representatives also passed nine IRS reform bills. This occurred in nine separate votes, but received zero mention from Todd, Mitchell, or any other “Meet the Press” panelist.
Those who watched “Meet the Press” last week and consumed no other news would have no clue that legislation was approved by Congress that sets a major precedent enabling significant deregulatory reform, with massive implications for the entire economy.
And that is why this author will never again being tuning into “Meet the Press.” It’s simply not a good place to find out what is going on.
Patrick Gleason (@patrickmgleason) is director of state affairs at Americans for Tax Reform.
