{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.barrasso.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/news-releases?ContentRecord_id=1DACADD0-AA09-46EB-9939-0647CFB20E17", "Barrasso: Republicans Are Delivering on Regulatory Relief", "2017-12-06", "2017", "2017-12", "Republican", "House", "WY", "John Barrasso", "B001261", "www.barrasso.senate.gov", null, null, "legacy", "\u201cPresident Trump and Republicans in Congress are cutting regulations, and the economy is growing at 3 percent. That\u2019s the kind of change that\u2019s possible under Republican pro-growth policies.\u201d\r\nClick here to watch Sen. Barrasso\u2019s remarks.\r\nWASHINGTON, D.C.\u2014 Today, U.S. Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) delivered the following remarks on the Senate floor on how President Trump and Republicans in Congress are growing the economy by cutting unnecessary regulations.\r\nExcerpts of Senator Barrasso\u2019s remarks:\r\n\u201cAbout a year ago, the American people voted for fundamental change in this country.\r\n\u201cLast week, Republicans in the Senate continued to deliver.\r\n\u201cWe passed a plan to give Americans substantial tax relief.\r\n\u201cThis legislation is exactly what people were asking for last November \u2013 and it\u2019s exactly what this country needs now.\r\n\u201cBecause of this Republican plan, people will be able to keep a lot more of their hard-earned money.\r\n\u201cThey\u2019re going to be able to find that their taxes are going to be simpler and fairer.\r\n\u201cThey\u2019re going to see our economy getting stronger and healthier.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s good news for our country \u2013 and it\u2019s certainly good news for the American people.\r\n\u201cThis legislation was an important promise that Republicans made, and it\u2019s a promise that Republicans have kept.\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s just the latest Republican accomplishment that is helping Americans.\r\n\u201cAnother thing that\u2019s been going on has been the tremendous relief from Washington regulations that Republicans are providing.\r\n\u201cI think a lot of people lost track of exactly how much damage Democrats and the Obama administration had been doing to the American economy.\r\n\u201cThe Obama administration added 285 major regulations during the course of the previous administration.\r\n\u201cEvery one of them imposed a burden on Americans.\r\n\u201cThe total cost of these is $122 billion per year.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s both the direct cost in terms of the money, and also counting the time needed to fill out paperwork created by these rules.\r\n\u201cTwenty-one of these rules were actually finalized after the 2016 presidential election.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s after the American people had spoken, and said that they wanted change.\r\n\u201cPresident Obama went right ahead piling more regulations onto people\u2019s backs anyway.\r\n\u201cSo one of the first things that Republicans in Congress did this year was to start striking down unnecessary, burdensome, costly regulations from the Obama years.\r\n\u201cRepublicans wiped 15 of these major rules off the books.\r\n\u201cA major rule is a rule that costs over $100 million in terms of the compliance cost, the actual cost, the time cost.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s going to save Americans as much as $36 billion over time.\r\n\u201cOne of these rules was an important part of President Obama\u2019s war on coal.\r\n\u201cIt was called the stream buffer rule.\r\n\u201cIt was designed to shut down a lot of the coal mining that\u2019s going on in this country.\r\n\u201cIt would have destroyed up to a third of coal mining jobs in America.\r\n\u201cSo we passed a congressional resolution that protected coal mining jobs, and protected American energy independence.\r\n\u201cWe struck down 14 regulations like this one in the first few months of this year.\r\n\u201cIn October, Republicans blocked a 15th rule.\r\n\u201cThat was a new regulation from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.\r\n\u201cThe rule was written during the Obama administration, and Obama appointees at the agency finalized it last summer.\r\n\u201cThis is the agency that\u2019s been in the news recently because it\u2019s so out-of-control.\r\n\u201cRepublicans in Congress had to step in and get rid of an unnecessary rule that was really just a payoff by the Democrats to trial lawyers.\r\n\u201cSo Republicans have saved Americans $36 billion by getting rid of rules and regulations \u2013 Democrats, on the other hand, cost the American people $122 billion a year in costs due to rules and regulations.\r\n\u201cRepublicans in the Senate also took a major step in this tax relief legislation by repealing the Obamacare insurance mandate tax.\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s going to save a lot of Americans a lot of money.\r\n\u201cIn 2015, there were 6.7 million Americans who paid this tax.\r\n\u201cThe average tax penalty by the American people this year has been $700.\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a big deal to give American families relief from that tax burden.\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s also a big part of rolling back this idea that Washington knows best what works all across the country.\r\n\u201cThe Obamacare insurance mandate is more than a tax \u2013 and the damage it does is more than just the paperwork, and the money that people have to pay.\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s an outrageous and an unfair requirement that people have to buy something that isn\u2019t right for them and their family, but the government says they have to buy.\r\n\u201cWhen Republicans struck down this mandate, we gave people back the freedom to decide for themselves \u2013 and to make their own choices.\r\n\u201cSo Republicans in Congress have been very busy saving Americans from the burdens and the injustice of these Obama regulations.\r\n\u201cI can tell you that we have a very strong ally in the form of the Trump administration. President Trump has been the Deregulator in Chief.\r\n\u201cSince his very first day in office, he\u2019s been rolling back the regulations that people had been straining under for the previous eight years.\r\n\u201cHe froze action on nearly 2,000 Obama administration rules that hadn\u2019t taken effect yet.\r\n\u201cHe wrote a new rule for his administration \u2013 one new rule in, two go out.\r\n\u201cThis said that for every significant new regulation, his administration would offset it by getting rid of two other rules.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s how you make a difference in Washington.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s how the president was able to remove 860 ineffective, duplicative, and obsolete regulations in just his first six months in office.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s a very big difference from what Democrats in Washington did \u2013 and we\u2019ve already started seeing the results.\r\n\u201cThe American economy has created two million jobs since President Trump was elected a little over a year ago.\r\n\u201cOur economy grew at a rate of 3.3 percent last quarter.\r\n\u201cThe unemployment rate has dropped to 4.1 percent.\r\n\u201cLast Friday, the Washington Post had two items on one page of the paper.\r\n\u201cThe first one said that consumer spending had increased in October, and incomes grew.\r\n\u201cThe article says, \u2018The October rise indicates that consumer spending, which accounts for 70 percent of economic activity, began the fourth quarter with healthy momentum.\u2019\r\n\u201cThe second article, same day, Washington Post, Friday noted that weekly applications for unemployment aid fell for the week.\r\n\u201cIt said that when the number of unemployment applications are low like this, it\u2019s a sign that hiring is healthy.\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s a sign that employers are confident enough to keep workers on the payroll.\r\n\u201cDuring the Obama years, Washington Democrats piled on all of these regulatory impacts on the economy.\r\n\u201cBecause of them, economists said that they expect future growth to be around 1.8 percent.\r\n\u201cPresident Trump and Republicans in Congress are cutting regulations, and the economy is growing at three percent.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s the kind of change that\u2019s possible under Republican pro-growth policies.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s why we\u2019re confident that we\u2019re on the right track.\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s why we\u2019re confident that the economy is going to continue to accelerate under the tax relief that we passed this past week.\r\n\u201cIt\u2019s why we\u2019re confident that America will continue to thrive when we give people relief from the Washington regulations \u2013 and start to unwind the red tape.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s what the American people voted for a little over a year ago.\r\n\u201cThat\u2019s what Republicans are delivering \u2013 in Congress, and in the White House.\u201d\r\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z", "2026-03-30T12:14:52Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.barrasso.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/news-releases?ContentRecord_id=1DACADD0-AA09-46EB-9939-0647CFB20E17"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 0.9579109027981758, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}