Washington Examiner
Clyde Wayne Crews

January 5, 2015

Wayne Crews discusses the year in regulation with  Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard:

In a brand new calculation done by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the president’s team issued 3,541 rules and regulations in 2014 when Congress OK’d 129 laws he also signed.

That, according to the president’s critics, means that Obama and his crew have usurped Congress when it comes to writing laws.

That huge wave of regulations for every law is what CEI’s Vice President Clyde Wayne Crews calls the “Unconstitutionality Index.” He explained: “The Unconstitutionality Index symbolizes the fruits of over-delegation of congressional power by Congress. Over-delegation has emboldened the executive branch such that, if there are limits it recognizes, one cannot fathom what they might be.”

Crews added that “the erosion of the Constitution’s separation of powers doctrine, and the very notion of a balance of powers besides, means that regulators and bureaucrats now make most laws. Obama’s multiple, it may be seen, tends to be higher than Bush.”

And if the number of new regulations seems high, Crews notes that it is likely even higher with Obama’s pledge to approve laws through executive actions.

“That’s not even counting the pen and phone and other regulatory dark matter that are rising in prominence like bulletins, guidance documents, blog posts and press conferences that amount to ‘law’ in their own right,” he said in a new report provided in advance to Secrets.