Sen. Mike Lee says he has two stacks of papers in his office — a short stack, from a few 100 up to 1,000 pages high, of the laws passed by Congress in a given year. The second stack reaches upward of 13 feet tall, and is the Federal Register, or, as Lee said, “the annual cumulative index of federal regulations.”
Speaking at the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah, where he participated in a Q&A with Sutherland Institute President Rick Larsen, Lee said the two stacks provide a visual representation of what he considers one of the most serious problems plaguing Washington, D.C. — Congress has ceded its power to write laws to “unelected bureaucrats,” or what some Republicans have come to refer to as “the swamp.”
To be clear, Lee didn’t use the word “swamp,” which, in addition to the bureaucracy, can refer to lobbyists and other power brokers in the nation’s capital. Lee said — twice — that he did not blame federal employees for the power delegated to them. Instead he placed the blame squarely on Congress, and said it was a “bipartisan” problem.
“This is about accountability, and it’s about liberty in the purest sense — what it means to live in a free country. What it means to live in a system in which your government operates pursuant to democratic principles, (which) means that those who make your laws should be elected and accountable through an election,” said Lee, a Republican who represents Utah.
Read what Lee said about his REINS Act, which would try to shift lawmaking power back to Congress.
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