WASHINGTON ? The House was voting Friday on a Republican bill to drastically curtail government regulation, rejecting arguments from Democrats that it would endanger the air, children's toys, workplaces and other public safety priorities.
Republicans were making their most ambitious effort yet to attack regulations that businesses dislike, but critics said the measure would emasculate federal protections. The White House budget office, siding with Democrats, issued a veto threat in advance of the vote, saying the bill would subject the government to unprecedented hurdles.
"America faces an avalanche of unnecessary federal regulatory costs," Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, said during House debate. "Yet the Obama administration seeks to add billions more to that cost."
Democratic Rep. George Miller of California angrily denounced the bill, saying the U.S. has spent great time and effort "to ensure when workers go to work every day, they will return safely to their home."
"This legislation begins to bring that to an endm because it would needlessly and recklessly expose our workers to injuries ..." said Miller, the senior Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee.
At this point, the fight is mainly a 2012 campaign issue because the Democratic-run Senate is unlikely to pass this or other anti-regulation bills approved this year by the GOP-led House.
Until now, Republicans have focused on derailing specific rules and regulations from President Barack Obama's administration, many of them from the Environmental Protection Agency. The latest effort, however, would curtail regulators and their proposed rules across the entire federal government.
The bill considered Friday, the Regulatory Accountability Act, would put numerous hurdles in place before new rules could be issued. Regulators would have to consider the legal authority for the rule, the nature and significance of the problem, any reasonable alternatives, and potential costs and benefits of the alternatives.
Federal courts would have an expanded role, and the government would have a tougher legal standard to meet for a proposed rule to be adopted.
OMB Watch, an advocacy organization that tracks federal regulations, said if the bill already had been law, the government would not have been able to issue a finding that greenhouse gases endangered public health. The group said it would have been more difficult to withstand court challenges to findings that a popular weed killer was dangerous. It would have been tougher to defend statements about the health impact of too much salt. And the government would have had to weaken a strong rule on lead in gasoline.
Still to come, probably next week, is a bill that would make it far easier for Congress to kill regulations.
The House on Thursday passed the first of the three bills in this latest anti-regulation effort. It would give more weight to the impact of federal regulations on small businesses, whose owners can be a powerful political force and are being courted by both parties. That bill cleared the House on a 263-159 vote and now goes to the Senate.
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