Congressional Review Act

Is that something you had been prepared for? And even if you had, how does that affect your legal strategy fighting that

decision? Yeah, well, we sued because he tried to misuse the Congressional Review Act to try to undermine the clean car waivers that we have the authority to seek and that we secured under the Clean Air Act.

And he tried to mischaracterize these waivers, which are orders under the law, as rules.

And they're not rules.

Is the U.S. Supreme Court a court where we think we're going to win and we have won? Excuse me, where we have one every single time? No.

But we are confident because we have the facts and the law on our side.

And there is no doubt it is undisputed under the law that a waiver is an order and it's not a rule and it's not subject to the Congressional Review Act.

So we'll take that to any court.

Yes, the White House is obviously very close to politics too, but if you compare that to the courts or to the regulatory agencies, the frontline for politics is Congress because they're elected by people.

um so you know when you throw all that money in congress says ah there's a problem like i'm a hammer you are a nail let's solve that problem with i like i want to solve that problem and so that's where we started to see a lot of traction on the legislative front so you know uh early last year we saw the repeal of the irs broker rule which was sort of this onerous hard you know impossible to comply with rule on on tax reporting for decentralized entities that just didn't work That was pulled back via a Congressional Review Act resolution.

We then saw the passage of the Genius Act, which is the stablecoin regulatory framework and an issue Congress had been working on for years, all of a sudden had the political momentum to get done.

And then the final issue was sort of this Clarity Act.

We n- wanna be patience, patient because how well you do the rule makes a lot of difference.

The other thing I'll just say, and then, and then we'll get into it, um, since we've been in the majority, the three of us have had the good fortune with a Republican president, we've been able to, uh, launch several, um, CRAs, Congressional Review Acts.

That they are really the precursor to what I wish one day could be the REINS Act.

But it was a tool that was put into place in, uh, it, with the Contract with America in 1995 when the Republicans took the House for the first time in over 40 years.

We don't know who's going to be in control of Congress or the Senate.

They have this Congressional Review Act power that allows them to look back 60 legislative days.

Remember, they don't legislate every day.

There's a lot of gaps in there.

The credit card late fee rule was vacated by a federal court in April of 2025.

The overdraft fee rule was overturned by Congress through the Congressional Review Act.

The open banking rule, Section 1033, is stuck in a void that it won't seemingly ever escape from.

The finalized rule that effectively eliminated disparate impact analysis from the enforcement of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, a foundational pillar of fair lending since 1974.

That's not an accident.

Today, we're going to explore the strategy behind the chaos, what executive orders actually do, how the Congressional Review Act is being used in ways we've never seen before, and what we can do about it.

I'm your host, Missy Rents, and this is the Parks Podcast.

I'm so excited to welcome Rebecca Gillis to the Parks Podcast.

And it's worrisome because public lands and those committees used to be the places where a lot of bipartisan action happened.

And so we're seeing that.

I really do want to highlight some other aberrations we're seeing in this Congress, and that's really the use of the Congressional Review Act.

in a new and particularly troublesome way.

So it's a strategy they're employing in a wide variety of places.

Another tool that they're using that is really difficult to reverse, if not impossible, is the Congressional Review Act, where you see, you know, the boundary waters, canoe, wilderness canoe area, canoe wilderness area, whatever it's called.

You know, they revoked a mineral withdrawal policy that was made under the Biden administration.

The Biden administration said, no, you can't mine here because it would impact this watershed.

There's some, I don't remember the percentage offhand, but some huge amount of the country's fresh water is held in the Boundary Waters.

They're trying to protect this watershed as well as this wilderness.

And that was overturned via the Congressional Review Act.

Now what the Congressional Review Act does that's so impactful is it says that When you overturn this law, you cannot make any similar law going forward.