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Attorney General Jeff Sessions is rescinding an Obama-era Justice Department letter that asked local courts across the country to be wary of slapping poor defendants with fines and fees to fill their jurisdictions’ coffers, part of a broad rollback of guidance that Sessions believes overreached. It’s the latest move in Sessions’s effort to dramatically reshape the Justice Department by undoing many of the reforms imposed by his predecessors and giving the institution a harder edge. Sessions is revoking 25 previous guidance documents dating back decades and covering topics as diverse as ATF procedures and the Americans With Disabilities Act. In...

Today, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that, pursuant to Executive Order 13777 and his November memorandum prohibiting guidance documents, he is rescinding 25 such documents that were unnecessary, inconsistent with existing law, or otherwise improper. In making the announcement, the Attorney General said: “Last month, I ended the longstanding abuse of issuing rules by simply publishing a letter or posting a web page. Congress has provided for a regulatory process in statute, and we are going to follow it. This is good government and prevents confusing the public with improper and wrong advice.” “Therefore, any guidance that is outdated, used to circumvent...

Drop this grenade. Dodge this bullet. Give us tax reform. Give us regulatory reform. Numerous times the President has said in his opinion the Republicans should let Obamacare alone for a year or two. Let it implode (as it was designed to do) while the Democrats still own it. When President Trump gave his well-received speech at CPAC, he said that he has told Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and the Republican leadership in Congress to simply “let it implode.” The law is simply “repealing itself,” Trump told the audience. “All we have to do is let it implode.”...

Stanford University Economist John B. Taylor and Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Diana Furchtgott-Roth recently told a congressional subcommittee that rolling back excessive government regulations and eliminating the threat of tax hikes would promote private-sector job growth more than another round of stimulus spending. But President Barack Obama, in the midst of his West Coast fundraising jaunt, said he makes no apologies for Wall Street regulation and environmental rules and doesn't buy the GOP charge they're costing jobs.

Obama bureaucrats ignore president’s call for regulatory reformLike so much of President Obama’s agenda, the promise of regulatory reform has proved entirely empty. After Democrats received a beat-down at the polls last November, an executive order was dashed off promising to pare back the job-killing regulations being pumped out by federal agencies that the president said “were just plain dumb.” On Friday, House Republicans called Mr. Obama’s bluff. Executive Order 13563 set a deadline of May 18 for preliminary plans from departments and agencies to streamline operations and repeal those dumb rules. Mr. Obama basked in widespread praise for his...

Sen. Chris Dodd's latest bill to fix the financial system is another failure. After months of negotiation, he's produced a "reform" of the regulatory system that simply fails to deal with the causes of the 2008 crisis -- which nearly saw the collapse of the US banking system. Reform is urgently needed, but the senator has proved incapable of significantly improving on the widely criticized plan he presented in November. With Dodd retiring after this year, the best course is probably to start over in January, under new leadership. What's wrong with the new effort? The central flaw is that...

Rep. Jeb Hensarling spoke with WNO on the upcoming Republican Regulatory Reform plan and its four parts. "Obamanomics is a failure" “It is a plan that essentially does a few things. Number one, it says no more bailouts. America is tired of turning this into a bailout nation.” “The Democrats, instead, want to go about and create a new office of consumer punishment, not consumer protection, that will actually give an unelected group of bureaucrats the power to take away your credit cards, to take away your mortgages, to say whether or not you can even get interest on your...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/09/02/25/Overhaul/ THE BRIEFING ROOM • THE BLOG Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 7:18 pm Overhaul White House photo 2/25/09 by Pete Souza It's clear that a lot of factors led us into this economic crisis, but one of the biggest was that our economy was left exposed by regulations that were out of date and regulators who weren't minding the store. President Obama today took that problem head on by laying out 7 key principles for transforming the nation's regulatory system. We must: Enforce strict oversight of financial institutions that pose systemic risks...