In government, there are ways to make a splash and ways to quietly get things done.
President Trump made a splash Monday with an executive order requiring that for every new regulation in the Federal Register, two get rolled back. The idea's got a certain rhythm to it, but its exact impact is still unclear.
It's not easy for a president to simply roll back a regulation once it's made its way through a public "notice and comment" period and onto the Federal Register.
Congress, however, has powers the president does not. And the Republican majority there is taking full advantage of them.
Using a 1996 law known as the Congressional Review Act, Republicans are in the middle of rolling major Obama-era regulations with little in the way of public attention.
The Congressional Review Act gives Congress the power to undo "recently finalized" regulations with just a simple majority vote in the House and Senate, and then the president's signature. Right now, that means the GOP can unravel any Obama-era regulation finalized since June 2016.
Theoretically, as Brad Plumer notes over at Vox, that could put more than 50 regulations on the chopping block. But it's rare for Congress and the President to use the law at all. In fact, it's only been used once before, under President George W. Bush, to repeal a Clinton-era ergonomics rule.
Right now, Congress is targeting five. And there's good reason to think more might come later. But here are the rules set to disappear this week:
SEE ALSO: The Trump administration could end up defending an Obama-era EPA rule in court
The stream protection rule:
This environmental regulation targeting coal companies has been a GOP target since before the election, and Trump singled it out on his website the day after he became president-elect. After a series of incidents where coal mines poisoned local water supplies, the rule was written to force mining companies not to begin new projects without first developing a plan to restore affected streams after all the coal gets hauled out of the earth.
The idea was that if the companies were responsible for monitoring and later restoring the health of these streams, they'd be less likely to poison them in the first place. Coal advocates argued that it would put an unreasonable cost on the industry.
The House voted 228-194 Wednesday to roll back the rule (which, like the other four on this list, had not yet gone into effect). The Senate agreed, voting 54-45 Thursday. Trump is expected to sign the rule, and once he does, it will go up in smoke.
The Social Security gun rule:
As part of the Obama administration's effort to tighten up background check procedures for people who want to buy guns, this rule enlisted the Social Security Administration (SSA) in the task of identifying people too mentally impaired to own a firearm.
The rule requires the SSA to add people from its database who are too mentally impaired to handle their own affairs to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. Critics argued that it unfairly targeted and violated the Second Amendment rights of people with mental disabilities who might not be dangerous.
The House voted 235-180 Thursday to roll it back.
The "resource extraction rule"
This rule had an enemy no less powerful than the current US Secretary of State, and recent CEO of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson. Created through the SEC under Dodd-Frank and the Consumer Protection Act, the rule required that oil companies and other resource extractors disclose payments to foreign governments.
Tillerson, who flew to DC to lobby against the section of the law driving the rule in 2010, argued that it placed an unfair burden on US companies that their foreign counterparts don't have to deal with, requiring them to disclose trade secrets.
After the vote on the rollback cleared the House Wednesday and the Senate early Friday, it appears this is a burden ExxonMobil won't have to deal with after all.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider