Sen. Mike Lee expressed concern with the growing delegation of congressional authority to the administrative state in his conversation with Rick Larsen, Sutherland Institute’s president and CEO, at the Congressional Series event at the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah. 

“Our Founding Fathers … made Congress the most dangerous branch. The power to make law is inherently dangerous,” Lee said. 

Lee stressed that this “dangerous power” has been handed off to federal departments far too often. 

“I keep two stacks of documents in my office in Washington. One short stack and one tall stack.” 

The short stack “consists of laws passed by Congress in the last year,” he said. “The other stack is often 13 feet tall … and it consists of last year’s Federal Register.” 

The senator explained that the Federal Register consists of the rules and regulations imposed upon the American people by executive branch agencies.

Lee sees this as a problematic abdication of authority. 

“The people who write those hundred thousand pages don’t work for you, you don’t ever get a chance to vote for or against them, and that’s a problem.” 

Regarding potential solutions, Larsen asked the senator to dive deeper into the proposed “REINS Act,” or the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act, of which Lee is a co-sponsor. 

“What it says in essence,” the senator explained, “every new, major rule [or] regulation … would not be self-executing. It couldn’t take effect without Congress affirmatively enacting it into law.” 

 Lee urged voters to support returning lawmaking power back to Congress. 

“This is about accountability,” he said. “It’s about liberty in the purest sense.” 

You can watch every conversation from the 2023 Congressional Series by visiting this page.