CEI Today: Regulations outpace laws, ethanol policy & violence, and E-Verify's fatal flaws

REGULATION > LAW - WAYNE CREWS & RYAN YOUNG

American Spectator: The Anti-Democracy Index

Not only do executive branch agencies makes laws every day by issuing regulations that have the force of law, they do more lawmaking than Congress — a lot more. In a typical year, Congress will pass between 100 and 200 laws, while regulatory agencies will pass more than 3,500 regulations. In 2011, Congress passed 81 laws while agencies published 3,573 final rules — a difference of a factor of 47. In no year since 2003 has the imbalance been less than a factor of 12. The polite term for this is regulation without representation, and it is clearly anti-democratic.  > Read the full commentary

> Interview the authors

ETHANOL POLICY -> VIOLENCE? - MARLO LEWIS Globalwarming.org: Study Links Ethanol Policy to Food Price Increases, Mideast Turmoil So in 2012-2013 what is pushing maize prices up to and beyond the violence threshold? The drought is a factor. The researchers also blame two policies: the “deregulation of commodity futures markets” and the “diversion of almost 50% of the US maize crop to ethanol.” Those policies, they contend, “are ill-advised and should be changed.” > Read the full commentary > Interview Marlo Lewis

E-VERIFY - LAURA W. MURPHY & FRED L. SMITH, JR. The Wall Street Journal: E-Verify's 'Hang Everyone' Approach If you hang everyone, the old saying goes, you will catch some guilty people. That adage points to the fatal flaw of an employment-verification program tucked into several recent immigration-reform proposals in Congress. The E-Verify program—which several states are experimenting with, but which would become mandatory nationwide under proposed new law—targets every employee that a business hires, in the hope of weeding out a few undocumented immigrants from the workforce. In the process, E-Verify erects dangerous hurdles to employment for legal workers and degrades the privacy of working Americans. > Read the full commentary > See also:National ID Proponents’ Bad Arguments

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