Young: Let's end era of overregulation

As I travel Indiana, one thing I continually hear from employers is that costly regulations from Washington are choking their ability to serve customers and grow good-paying jobs.

Here in Southwest Indiana, there might be no better example than the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement’s “Stream Protection Rule” issued in the waning days of the Obama administration. Don’t let the name fool you; this regulation does nothing to protect waterways. Instead, it’s an attempt to end the coal mining operations that employ so many Hoosiers, and sustain our communities.

That’s why I support a resolution in the United States Senate to overturn job-killing coal regulation before it does serious damage to Indiana’s economy.

The coal rule would effectively lock-up to half of the nation’s coal supply below ground, and thus destroy as many as a third of America’s coal mining jobs.

Government’s job is to create an environment that encourages job growth and access to things like affordable energy. When we do regulate, we need to make sure that a specific problem is being addressed in an economically reasonable manner and that new problems aren’t being created. The 2,400-page Stream Protection Rule would create a host of hardships with negligible benefits.

While serving in the U.S. House of Representatives, I sponsored a bill called the REINS Act that gives Congress the final say on such burdensome regulations, like the “Stream Protection Rule”. Now, in the Senate, I’m sponsoring the same bill along with Senator Rand Paul. When Congress delegates regulatory authority to federal bureaucrats and bureaucrats overstep their bounds with such regulations, Congress ought to have a say. Then, the American people can hold us, their elected representatives, accountable for heavy-handed rules coming out of Washington.

Thankfully, we had the opportunity to overturn the Obama administration’s destructive coal rule.  However, we shouldn’t have to resort to last-ditch efforts to stop burdensome rules and regulations.

It’s time to end the era of federal overreach and allow Hoosiers to pursue their livelihoods without fear that a rule passed by unelected bureaucrats will harm their industry.

Todd Young is a first-term Republican U.S. Senator from Indiana.