Special interest groups
Cry Wolf Quotes
In 1989, sympathetic members of Congress got the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act amended to force banks to collect racial data on mortgage applicants; this allowed various studies to be ginned up that seemed to validate the original accusation… bank regulators required the loosened underwriting standards, with approval by politicians and the chattering class. A 1995 strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act required banks to find ways to provide mortgages to their poorer communities. It also let community activists intervene at yearly bank reviews, shaking the banks down for large pots of money.
Enforcement of Federal standards through Federal inspectors would result in the most intimate involvement of the Secretary of Labor in all operations affecting interstate commerce….easily result[ing] in blowing up the most minor grievances to very substantial proportions. A minor complaint can very well become a ‘federal case’. Provision of this kind of authority in the Federal government would tempt many an employee representative to boost his stock by calling on the federal government, since the very presence of a federal inspector could be used to demonstrate his importance and influence.
Testimony submitted to this hearing by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) proposes a series of changes to federal environmental law that taken together can only serve to cripple American oil and natural gas production without attendant environmental benefits....The Committee – and more broadly the Congress – should summarily reject NRDC’s proposals. They follow the tired path of alleging to the Congress the need to change laws and regulations that do not follow NRDC’s world view and where NRDC and its allied professional anti-development organizations have failed to change the regulatory program through the normal processes or by appealing to the court system. This collection of proposals will have one clear effect – less exploration and production of American oil and natural gas and more foreign dependency. This is hardly an energy policy that makes sense of America.
We don’t want a lot of innocent small-business people who are trying to do the right thing to be hauled into court.
