As next weeks midterm elections draw near, many Republicans in Congress are beginning to lay out their plans if the GOP gains majority control in the U.S. House and Senate.
While the top issues mentioned by the Republican leadership are inflation, crime, education, and energy, one Alabama member of Congress is calling for more of a focus on the burdensome regulations, which he believes hamper the growth of the U.S. economy.
Tuesday on WVNN’s “The Yaffee Program,” U.S. Rep. Gary Palmer (R-Hoover) discussed what he’d like to see a GOP-controlled Congress accomplish starting in 2023.
“There’s a third thing that hardly anyone has talked about,” Palmer said. “And it is the fact that Biden added over $200 billion in new regulatory costs in his first year in office alone. That’s three times what Obama did in his first year. So, I think one of the first things that we need to do is start looking a regulations that can be rolled back and start hitting those first.”
The congressman highlighted how former President Trump was able to tackle overregulation in the economy during his presidential tenure.
“It’s really what jumpstarted the economy,” he said. “The first 14 or 15 bills we passed were under the Congressional Review Act that repealed some of the more egregious regulations that were passed by the [Obama] administration, and Trump was totally on board with that.”
Palmer also talked about his personal experience in cutting back certain regulations during the past few years in D.C.
“I chaired the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Affairs and we were working on eliminating obsolete [regulations], redundant, contradictory, and that’s what jumped started the economy,” Palmer said. “That was the first thing we did the first year of the Trump administration and later that year we passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act which furthered economic growth.”
The lawmaker had a warning for his colleagues in the Republican Party about actually delivering what was promised to the voters.
“They key post-election this time is for us to deliver on what we said,” he said. “Now we at the same time have to manage expectations because we will not have 60 votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster and we will not have two-thirds in the Senate to overcome a veto, but particularly in the House, we have pass to legislation that’s going to lay down a marker for the American people about what things will look like when we have the House, the White House, and the Senate.”
Palmer concluded by once again calling Republican voters to show up and vote in big numbers on Nov. 8.
“As Reagan famously said in his ’64 speech at the Republican National Convention, ‘this is a time for choosing’,” Palmer said. “And there are certain things out there that we need to take into account and face the realities of the choices we’ve made in the past and I think next Tuesday corrects them.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
