Unemployment and poverty that it could cause. To stave off those avoidable deaths, America Needs to rein reinervate the economy. And were listening to ted cruz and mike lee. Each has proposals that could kick start our economy and keep it going strong on a longterm bas bases. I would now like to invite senator cruz and senator lee to join me. Before we start todays discussion. I want to give each senator to offer some introductory remarks. Senator cruz youre up at bat first. Good morning, its a pleasure to join you. Thank you for taking the time to participate and, paula, good to see you and mike, its good to see you and what a testament to the wonders of technology that were able to have an intimate conversation thousands of miles apart and im pretty sure that through the el electrons, this is qualifies as social distancing. The fact that were able to do this so easily is a testament to the opportunities that have been presented by this enormous crisis. As a nation, were facing two simultaneous crisis, a Public Health crisis, the coronavirus pandemic killed over 300,000 people and an economic crisis over 36 Million People have lost their jobs as the economy has ground to a halt. And unusually, in terms of economic crises, this one is not the cause of some fundamental weakness in the economy, its not a recession that was driven by the misallocation of capital, instead the direct results of Government Policies put in place to fight the pandemic and were seeing now millions of americans out of work, over 20 of the American Work force has lost their job in the last two months. That is unprecedented in our lifetimes. You have to go back to the Great Depression to find a comparable economic catastrophe thats struck the American Economy, not only that, but we have millions of Small Businesses that have either gone out of business or are the verge of bankruptcy. So the crisis level is enormo enormous. But that being said, that also means the task Going Forward is enormous. Now, mike and i and all the members of the senate, we have worked together on four separate pieces of legislation, all of which passed overwhelmingly with overwhelming bipartisan support. Those pieces of legislation were theyre often referred to as stimulus legislation, but thats not, in fact, what i think they are. I dont call them stimulus and in fact, what i call them is relief legislation, because they were designed to provide immediate relief, shortterm emergency bridge loans to individuals and families and Small Businesses to help them get through the immediate crises they were facing. The stage were at now, there are some on the democratic side of the aisle that want to keep shovelling money, i tell you the quantity of money to congress had as spent takes your breath away and mike and i at times are not able to breath, the amount of debt our nation is taking to try to get through this crisis. The next stage, where we are now, i believe the next legislation should be recovery legislation, it should be focused not on relief, not on spending more money and just shovelling money at the problem, we cant fix it that way. Instead, the next stage should be focused on tax reform and Regulatory Reform, in other words, lessening the burdens on Small Businesses and job creators because the only way out of this mess, economically speaking, is to get people back to work and that means we need to be looking for policies that help the Small Businesses that are just starting to open up their doors again, that are just starting to see customers again. Policies that help them survive and rehire their employees and hopefully grow and thrive. Weve got to unleash the engine of the American Free enterprise system. The only thing Strong Enough to overcome in catastrophe, i would say on the regulatory side, one good place to start. Every regulation, federal regulation, state regulation and local legislation, everything suspended to deal with the crisis, we should start with a presumption that those regulations should stay suspended Going Forward. If it was deemed helpful for that regulation to be suspended during the time of crisis, it should still be helpful during recovery and i think thats what our focus needs to be is how do we empower Small Businesses to drive Free Enterprise forward and turn our economy around and get people back to work. Senator lee, do you have any opening remarks . Instead. Thanks so much. It really is an honor and a privilege to be with you and to be here with my friend, senator ted cruz. I agree with every word he just uttered, including the word, but, and, and the. One of the many things he said that was so right and appropriate for our time, the notion a that were not going fix our economy with more Government Spending and with more government programs. What we need is to get government out of the way so americans can start helping each other again and thats why i have cosponsored, along with senator cruz, a bill called the right to test act. This is legislation that would let states approve and distribute diagnostic tests when the state or the federal government has declared a Public Health emergency. Its wills why i cosponsored called the prime act, which will help farmers sell their livestock for higher prices and lower meat prices ultimately for consumers in grocery stores. Right now theres a weird bottle neck at meat packing plants and what the prime act does is to allow states to regulate slaughter facilities for meat sold within the same state. We have to remember the federal government was never intended to be this all incompassing regularly body that would regulate purely local activities like mining, agriculture, it wasnt meant to be the exclusive regulator of things like meat packing and yet,s its the federal comandeering that results for higher prices for consumers and lower prices for those who actually produce meat. And thats a problem. The prime act would help us deal with that. We also have to protect businesses from the problems that would otherwise arise. Protect those very businesses that want to reopen from trial lawyers who are trying to make a quick buck. Thats why i support the idea of reforming our federal courts to allow for whats called minimal diversity jurisdiction, this would allow for more businesses to move to federal court where its often easier to defend against trivial lawsuits. The constitution itself in article 3 section two sets out the formula for that and when youve got plaintiffs from one state and defendants from another state. You ought to be able to have in litigation that would otherwise be pending before state court, you ought to be able to have access to federal courts because theres a little more consistency between one federal court and another. I think were going to touch on this a little bit later, but our environmental laws, specifically the National Environmental policy act or nepa has its been caused has been weaponized by radical environmentalists and causing delays to federal Infrastructure Projects throughout the country. You want to know why it takes billions of additional dollars and many years longer to complete the same Infrastructure Projects that our grandparents bills, sometimes in a short time period decades ago, sometimes nepa is the problem. Im working on legislation to put up a shot clock, while protecting the environment. Theyre not at odds with each otherment many of our peer nations that have aggressive nepalike Environmental Protection laws. We stand out like a sore thumb as a country that doesnt put any time constraint on this process and yet, those countries, im thinking of countries like canada, are not exactly environmental hellholes, these are places that protect the environment and at the same time provide a reasonable set of expectation that consumers and businesses can look forward to in the economy. I think as well, we ought to look at the rules and regulations that ted referred to that have been suspended during the crisis. Included within these are many of the occupational licensing regulations. We should ask ourselves, why it is that these regulations were put in the place in the first place if they are prep to be dropped during a real emergency. Now, if we can see this crisis as an opportunity for systemic Regulatory Reform, then our economy can and i believe will come back stronger than ever. I continue to believe that our best days as americans remain ahead of us. In order to do that weve got to make the right choices. Thank you. Senator lee, thank you very much. Let me ask a question and this is a tossup to both of you. You both signed a may 14 letter to the Senate Minority and majority leaders, urging them to support statutory reform to provide regulatory relief for businesses. In the letter, you referred to, quote, paperwork reduction, unquote, and quote, removing outmoded compliance requirements. Now i know youve both mentioned several different possibilities of reforms that we should make. Do you have any specific examples in mind . And would it be possible, you think, to have those included in legislation that well see passed into law before the end of this year . Yeah, ill start with that if youd like. The most concrete example that im thinking of is the nepa reform legislation that im finalizing and should be introduced into the senate soon. This will do a number of things with the nepa process, but the most important reform in it would be to limit the amount of time that can be taken up at each stage of Environmental Review under the National Environmental protection act. Right now theres no limit to it, and so, agencies, between a combination of agency action, court action and preparations for those two separate venues, its not uncommon in this country to see a project, sometimes its a road or a high. Sometimes its an Energy Project or something much more pedestrian, but its not all that uncommon these days to see that taking more than a decade and theres no reason for that. We dont end up with a cleaner environment as a result of it taking that long. The review process itself makes sure we dont wreak havoc on the environment where we might otherwise. No reason they should take a decade. And i put in place requirements to allow the federal government to use corresponding state law document productions, as a substitute for what the federal government would otherwise be providing. If the state has already done something similar, the federal government ought to be able to handle that. This would reduce the overall volume of paper work and its something that could be put into a phase 4 legislative package, particularly if there ends up being an infrastructure component to that. Senator cruise, would you like to answer . So, i emphatically agree with everything that mike said and let me take several different pieces. Nepa reform, speeding up Environmental Review. Mike rightly mentioned that theres a process of building any project can be delayed years or even decades. And the way the system operates now, its not designed actually to protect the environment. Instead, what its designed to do is allow activist groups to use litigation to shut down a project, to shut down development. Its used as a tool simply to kill a project. A little over a week ago, i had a phone call with elon musk, the ceo and founder of tesla and spacex. Elon is hardly a right wing conservative activist, but he has publicly expressed his displeasure with the headquarters of teslas in california and they shut down their factory there, and hes expressed his displeasure with wanting to open up his factory and he has publicly expressed an interest, you know what . If california keeps doing this we may have to move our tesla headquarters out of california and maybe to texas so i called elon, and i said, hey, if you want to come to texas, wed love to have you. Texas is real simple. We love jobs. Anybody creating jobs, wed love to have you in addition to tesla and i think theres a real possibility. Im hopeful that well see tesla come to texas, but in addition to tesla, spacex has substantial operations in texas. This week, today weve got spacex launch, the first launch of u. S. Astronauts from u. S. Soil on u. S. Rocket in over a decade. Spacex will be launching from cape canaveral, but theyve also got a launch facility in south texas. And elon and i talked about their desire to substantial i expand the launch facility in south texas, creating more jobs in south texas and he says the biggest problem is the Environmental Review, we cant expand the operation until we get through the enormous red tape and bureaucracy. So i think that speeding that up is incredibly important. To give you a sense of scope, i actually pulled some numbers so between the year 2000 and 2016 the epa issued a total of 22 rules, estimated by omb to cost 1 billion or more. That was the total of 104. 4 billion dollars. Every other federal agency combined issued only 19 of those rules, that cost an estimated 34. 4 billion. So to put it in perspective, epa alone issued more of those rules than every other agency and more than three times as costly to the economy and so, i think speeding up that review and i think the administration has made positive steps in that regard. And whats interesting, mike and i both serve on the Commerce Committee and Judiciary Committee together, when you bring in local mayors, when you bring in local elected office holders, elected democrats, inevitably they express frustration with, they want to build a road, they want to build a bridge. Its almost impossible, the delay in permit goes on and on and on and i know mike and i both had conversations with the elected democrats and said, look, its your party thats putting those red blocks in the way. And i think this is an opportunity to speed that up and its an opportunity we should take advantage of. Senators, it seems possible that one of the reasons the Environmental Impact statements that get written resemble war and peace in terms of their magnitude and the amount of time it takes to write them, is that agencies might be afraid that unless they do work at length, the courts will strike it down. So, that brings up some general Regulatory Reform questions. There have been a variety of large scale proposals, such as a requirement that congress adopt any rule that has more than a 100 Million Dollar impact on the economy. Could you each address what you think the best way of trying to deal with these broader, general regulatory issues are so that businesses can actually start hiring people again, whether by eliminating environmental obstacles or others . Senator cruz, let me let you go senator lee if you want to do that, thats fine. I thought id let senator cruz go first on this one. I feel confident on this, mike, go ahead. Given the fact of any legislation pending with the wave of a magic wand, it would be the rein act. Registrations from the executive in need of scrutiny and does exactly what you just described, paul. Which is anytime federal regulation deemed economically significant costing over 100 million to comply with were put in place, it could not be selfexecuting. It could take effect as operative law until both houses of congress affirmatively passed it and presented it to the president for signature or veto. If we were to pass Something Like that, it would do a couple of important things that need to happen. Number one, it would restore the letter and spirit of article 1, section 1, clause one. The first section of the article 1 of the confusion, all power invested in the United States shall consist of a senate and house of representatives and article 11 goes on to explain the legislative formula for enacting law. You cannot do it without something passing the house and senate and being submitted to the president for signature or veto. If its vetoed, it can only pass above twothirds of the houses deciding to overturn it. My point is this, over the past few Decades Congress has become increasingly reliant on not passing actual laws, but passing platitudes and passing laws that say we shall have good laws and delegate to department x or department y, the task of writing, interpreting and enforce, rules of generally applicable law that are good. Now make it so. The problem with these laws is that not only are they put in place through a constitutionally suspect mechanism, but they are also suspect as a matter of policy and public acceptability for the same reasons that they violate the letter and spirit of the constitution, meaning, these men and women who inhabited our federal agencies and departments and bureaucrats who write these laws are well educated, well intentioned, hard working and highly specialized, but they dont work for you. You can fire your congressman every two years, you can fire your senators every six years, you cannot fire a bureaucrat. They dont stand for election. Theyre not really accountable to anyone who does in turn stand for election. So, this is really something that we need to do. Its really need a republican or a democratic leader, neither liberal or conservative, this is a constitutional mandate we ought to be fulfilling. It also hat the benefit, bringing them back into law making, making sure when we do something into federal law that its going to be really expensive. Somebody who is on the ballot is going to be on the line for putting it there. The u. S. Regulatory system cost the the American Economy 2 trillion a year, some say its more. Its difficult to ascertain, but those costs are not born simp