Next, a discussion on congress, courts and the socalled Administrative State at the annual Steamboat SpringsFreedom Conference in colorado. All right. We are switching gears. We have a very compelling discussion coming up on what is in a way the Fourth Branch of government and that is the Administrative State that has such an impact on all of our lives and our businesses. The rise of the Administrative State, will the u. S. Be a democracy in the future or a nation ruled by the Administrative State . Our panel is going to come up in just a minute. Youre going to get a preview of tonights Tony BlankleyFellowship Award presentation because the moderator of the panel is one of our two new recipients of the blankley fellowship. He is the chief washington correspondent for the hill and hill tv. He is also a media fellow at the Hudson Institute in washington, d. C. , where he cohosts the realignment podcast. He previously served as White House Correspondent for the daily caller and Foreign Affairs correspondent for the d. C. News foundation. He received his masters degree in u. S. National Security Policy from Georgetown University and his bachelors in economics from the George Washington university. Sauger has studied extensively across the globe spanning three continents and has visited over 40 countries. Im so proud to introduce one of our new Tony Blankley recipients. Gentlemen, please come on up. I wonder whos watching me now who, the irs i always feel like somebody is watching me and i have no privacy i always feel like somebody is watching me tell me is it just a dream i always feel like somebody is watching me thank you, everybody. Were just going to take a moment while one of our copanelists gets himself this is a decent time for just a little bit of background on the important discussion i think were having here today. Its about the Administrative State. Its been something that conservatism has been concerned about for a long time. The idea of unelected bureaucrats in washington who are making decisions about very important things that govern our daily lives. It goes back to the 1880s. One of the first regulatory agencies was the interstate commerce commission. That was when the markets were changing. There were railroads and goods being exchanged across state lines. How does the federal government concern itself from them with that . Then we had Woodrow Wilson who created the federal trade commission. This was government inserting itself into the way that we conduct commerce with that. We were a growing country. We were exchanging goods and through the industrial revolution, it caused a lot of problems the government started to insert itself into. We should all be concerned about that. Thats why we have two of our panelists here. We have peter wallison, financial policy studies at the American Enterprise institute. Hes an author. I think we have a bit of a preview on what his position is going to be. And then we also have ilya shapiro. Please welcome our panelists. I want to give both an opportunity to make opening remarks. Peter is interested in going over some of the arguments within the book. I want him to make sure they both can give you a framework for the discussion before we get to my questions and then well get to your questions as well. Peter, why dont we start with you . Opening remarks, a couple minutes to speak about this. Thank you very much, saagar. Im going to try to outrhyme the key arguments in judicial fortitude, the book. The first line is probably the most important. It is we will lose our democracy unless we can gain control of the agencies of the Administrative State. So the book is about the continuous drift toward government by unelected officials in washington which we call generally the Administrative State. And how we can stop this drift. The drift is happening because since the new deal, congress has been giving the agencies power almost to make laws themselves. The Congress Wont stop this on its own. Its easier for them. They dont have to make the difficult decisions that legislation requires. All they have to do is pass to the agency the difficult decisions and then they are home free and not subject in elections to having to justify the kinds of decisions made. If someone comes up to a congressman and asks why his farm pond, a pond he uses to feed his animals is getting regulated by the epa, the congressman says well, i didnt vote for that. Thats this out of control agency. But. The congressman did vote for that by giving that power to regulate farm ponds to the agency. So its a way that congress can be unaccountable, but also to avoid a lot of the things that we Want Congress to be involved in, and that is making the major decisions for all the legislation that they pass. Now, even more important, when Congress Delegates broad lawmaking type power to administrative agencies, it is violating the separation of powers in the constitution. The constitution vests all power to make laws in congress, that is the article one of the constitution says Congress Shall have all power to make laws. Article two gives the power to enforce the laws to the executive branch. And finally, article 3 gives the judicial power, the power to interpret the laws to the judiciary. The framers thought that liberty would be endangered if the same person or group had the opportunity both to make the law and to enforce the law. They looked around the world in the late 1700s when they were developing the constitution and what they saw was that where a king could make the law and enforce the law, tyranny was the result. And so from their perspective, the most important thing in the constitution was the structure, the separation of the powers. And they wanted to maintain that as often and as long as possible. This is exactly the problem that were having today. Because the powers are no longer separated. If congress is giving delegating, we say, delegating its Legal Authority to make laws to the executive branch and particularly to these agencies, made up of unelected officials. So the problem here is how do we stop this constant delegation of power to unelected officials who all live basically all live around washington d. C. , reflect the priorities of the people in and around washington d. C. , and not the American People who would be ordinarily represented by their Congress People, and those votes by Congress People would be the votes of the American People, but when they hand it over to executive agencies, theyre giving up the rights of the American People to make these decisions. So the separation of powers was so important to the framers that they set up the judiciary to protect it. And this we know from a federalist paper, 78 by alexander ham iilton who called the judiciary the guardians of the constitution, and he said the judges were given Lifetime Appointments so that they would have the fortitude, thats the language that i use in the book, the fortitude to stand up to the elected branches. That is the congress, and the president , if those branches were doing things that changed the way the constitution was supposed to work. And again, were exactly in that situation today because what we see happening is the system is being changed. Instead of Congress Making the laws, theyre passing the law making over to the executive branch. So this would have appalled our framers, and the thing we have to figure out is how we can stop this from happening. The book argues the way to stop this from happening is to restore something called the nondelegation doctrine. That sounds very legalistic. Its actually fairly simple, and what it means is that the courts have the power. They were given that power by the constitution. They have the power to declare when an act of congress violates the constitutional structure. This is different from violating the constitution with a policy of some kind. The courts should often stay out of that situation, but when youre talking about changing the constitutional structure, that is the whole separation of power structure as we have today, there congress, the courts, the Supreme Court in particular, should step in and declare a law that delegates power to the executive branch to be unconstitutional. That is possible now in a practical way, because fortunately we have had two new justices appointed to the Supreme Court. Justice gorsuch and justice kavanaugh. They joined three other justices in the Supreme Court who all declare themselves, consider themselves to be constitutionalists, and what that really means is that they believe that the constitution, the structure at least of the constitution, should be preserved at all costs. So i think as we approach the next couple years, when cases come to the court where the issue of nondelegation can be considered by the justices, i think we have a really good shot here that the nondelegation doctrine will be restored, and what does that do . It forces congress if a law is declared invalid because it is delegating authority to the executive branch, it forces congress to go back and reconsider that law and make the Big Decisions in that law itself. Thats what this book is about. Thank you, peter. Ilya, i want you to be able to get your points in here. Opening remarks and then well get to questions. Sure. And thats a good segway. I want to talk about two cases from this past term at the Supreme Court that kind of show both sides of the same coin and the pushback against the Administrative State. First i want to thank the steam boat institute jennifer schubertakin. Im glad i get to speak to you in not freshly off the ski slope, and actually, the second time in i think six months that peter and i are on this sharing a stage on this topic in colorado. We were both on the program at the Leadership Program at the rockies earlier this year. Im delighted to do that. So the two cases i want to mention picking up where peter left off are gundy and kaiser. Gundy is the nondelegation case. There are only eight justices. It was argued the first week of the term when Brett Kavanaugh was still answering questions from the senate, and although it was technically a loss, that is the court by a vote of 5 to 3 rejected the challenge to a particular statute that this was a federal sex offender registry statute, rejected that it delegated too much power to the attorney general to write the regulations. Justice gorsuch wrote a blistering dissent joined in full by john roberts, some people say is he going wobbly or triangulating in the middle. Joined in full by robert and tom mas, and alito who gave his vote to the majority wrote separately and didnt agree with the reasoning of the liberal justices. To say in some future case when theres a less freakish kind of law and when theres a majority willing to consider nondelegation, he might go in on that. That means in the next case when kavanaugh is participating, alito might go over there. We might have five votes to hold congresss feet to the constitutional fire and tell it you cant pass the truth, goodness, and beauty act and let the bu rareaucracy fill in what wants to do. One side is Congress Giving broad discretion to agencies. On the other side is judges not hold agencys feet to the fire. Doctrines developed judicial deference. Agencies interpret the statute that give them power and what was at issue this year, agencies reinterpreting their own past regulations. Now, the court by a vote of 5 to 4 did not throw out that doctrine. But the majority, the liberals plus john roberts tried to tighten the standards and said we will only defer to agencies in this context when they actually show expertise, when theyre acting as economists or scientists, not simply as lawyers. When the issue is truly when the regulation is ambiguous. Certain other considerations really tightening the scrutiny. Well see what happens in the lower courts in the next 5 to 10 years. Gorsuch with the lead blistering this time concurrence because they threw out the Lower Court Decision anyway, but dissent in all but name saying yeah, we ought to throw out this doctrine altogether. Well see what happens. Theres an appetite on the court for reigning in agencies both in terms of judges pushing back on them, and forcing congress to be more specific and narrower in terms of the authority that agencies are given. I want to throw a provocative question to this. I think the debate around the Administrative State is a debate about power and the role of government itself, and how conservatives should approach it. Theres a current debate thats ruling conservatism right now. It says that if corporations and the media are against us, that they are trying to force their way of life upon the United States. That there is no force more powerful than them. But the United States government and but de facto the Administrative State to step in on their behalf on behalf of the citizens and uphold their way of life. I want to get your take on why that might be the wrong tactic to take. The real danger to my mind is the American People, if we continue to see this drift of power to the administrative agencies, the American People will eventually decide that the government is not really representing them. Thats kind of what these what this group is saying. If that happens, it threatens the legitimacy of the u. S. Government. And it also it also threatens the willingness of people to obey the laws. The American People are very lawobserving, except what we read in the ynewspapers from tie to time. But the American People in general obey the laws because they believe they have made the laws through their representatives. However if they come to believe the laws are being made by faceless bureaucrats around wa district of columbia, theres much less reason to obey the law, and it looks as though theres a case for them not obeying the law, because its an illegitimate law. The government is not legitimately behaving. Weve seen this happen in brexit in europe. What the bridged people did in that case was to vote to withdraw from the eu because the regulations that were coming out of the brussels, out of the eus government in brussels were not things they could control. They didnt feel they had a voice in that. So we see the same dangers occurring here in the United States. And thats why i think its so important for us to stop this drift toward the administrative agencies and force more of the decisions to be made in congress. Ilya . There are separate issues here. One is the procedural one about how such a law to further regulate social Media Networks or google or other drivers of culture or how thats done. You could draw up a law, but take into account First Amendment concerns, making sure it properly affects interstate commerce. The constitutional bells and whistles, and avoid nondelegation problems and narrowly draw it and this sort of thing. It doesnt mean its still a good law. Im wary when Mark Zuckerberg comes to congress and says please regulate me that we give him that. Because these big established companies have lawyers and accountants and Compliance Officials that can deal with whatever congress is going to give them. Id rather not give whoever, whether its the fcc, congress itself, some other agency the power to tell us whats a proper amount of evenhanded commentary, or what have you. The real issue, and this is, i think, the font of a lot of the publics frustration with big everything, whether it be government, media, i. T. , corporations, or anything else, is that the serious imbalance of power thats come about both vertically and horizontally. So much power has swept into washington from states and localities and within washington, it swept to theed Administrative State. This was the source of the comments by ben sass. He talked about the dynamic where by congress doesnt resolve anything anymore. The legislature is where we clash out policy views but everything is being in this large pluralistic society, everything is being swept to washington and then congress isnt resolving it. Its pushing it to the administrative agencies. And it gets pushed into the court. You cant elect administrative people. You can only sue them. Anyway, im skeptical of new regulatory trends, but i think thats separate from whether you can draw those kind of laws good or bad in a way that is proper in terms of the regard for the Administrative State. So much of this seems to concentrate, some of this is debate argument. We talked about nondelegation and about the Supreme Court. It seems that it is almost certainly a function of the judiciary. So from this perspective, it actually matters quite a bit who is in the executive branch right now. How do you both think that the Trump Administration so far has faired in reigning in the Administrative State . Peter . Well, id have to say that up to now reigning in the Administrative State is very difficult. We just got five a majority of justices on the Supreme Court who would be inclined to reign in the Administrative State. Lets be clear about this. The left will not want to see any change. They like what the Administrative State does. Even some not on the left do, but we have to recognize our constitution requires that most of these major decisions be made by congress. And to the extent that they are made by agencies of the Administrative State, that is no longer a democratic republic that we thought we had. That is made up of people who are appointed to be experts in a particular area and dont pay any attention and dont have any desire to Pay Attention to what the American People actually think. So as far as im concerned, the important thing we have to focus on is to make sure that the government of the United States remains in the eyes of the American People, a legitimate government, because they are electing representatives who are making the laws for them. And to the extent that they is not the way things are working, we are going to be in trouble over time. Id add one other thing about what ilya said at the beginning, and that is there is a difference between the chevron case and the aur case. In the aur case, the decision by the Supreme Court did go along with the idea that the courts should defer to administrative agencies, but they put so many the liberals on the court to get the vote that they needed, put so many restrictions on how the aur doctrine could be imposed. They put cut it down. Its if its deference at all. A court would have to go through a tremendous amount of detail to be able to say that it will give deference to an agency. The chevron case, on the other hand, which the chief justice separated from this whole aur question, deference to an administrative agencies regulation, he said no, whatever however im voting on this doesnt have anything to do with my vote on chevron. And chevron is a case that is really troubling because it essentially gives the power to agencies. It tells lower courts they should defer to decisions agencies make about the powers given by congress. That means its difficult if youre trying to overturn a regulation by an agency, because the judge who youre arguing before is has been told by the Supreme Court he should defer to the agencys opinion about it own powers. And that has happened and has strengthened the Administrative State tremendously. That separated from the aur case, so although it looks as though we might have lost the aur case in the sense that deference still remains after the aur case, we havent gone to the point where we have lost chevron, and i think were going to win chevron the next time a case comes before the court. Go ahead, ilya. They might cut it down somewhat. I dont know if theres going to be five votes to throw it out. Its not supposed to be a political or id ya logical thing. Chevron itself was a decision by the Supreme Court overturning the left wing bent of the then d. C. Circuit in the 80s which was thwarting the deregulatory fishti fi initiatives. Depending on the makeup of the court thats making the decision, its like there was this odd moment during the gorsuch confirmation hearings when senators durbin and feinstein were criticizing gorsuch for his opinions that in turn expressed skepticism about chevron. They were saying they wanted to give rick perry and scott pruitt and betsy devos more power, because if you have strong chevron deference, that means the agencies have more power. It was a bizarre thing to argue. This is not supposed to be a left right thing. Back to that original question, how do you think the Trump Administration is doing so far . Right. The one interesting regulation which seems like a gimmick but actually has i think been successful is the rule that for every new regulation thats promulgated two have to be withdrawn. Thats worked. Weve definitely seen a slowdown in the production on the pages on the federal register. If you go to senator lees office on capitol hill, he has two stacks. One of the pages of bills passed by congress, legislation, and one stack thats of regulations. The one stack is the legislation is very short. And the regulations is like six feet tall along the wall to illustrate the point were governed not by congress, not by the legislature but by this Fourth Branch. Other things, the judicial appointments are helping with this not just in even more the lower courts than the Supreme Court are really having an effect. And the problem is the d. C. Circuit which handles so many of these regulatory appeals is still very skewed with especially obama nominees who are much more deferent shl to all sorts of agencies. I want to throw it to the audience. Please make your question actually a question. 10 to 15 seconds or ill be forced to cut you off. Firsthand over here. I dont mean for this question to come across as too lawyerly, but i am one. Can you comment on whether the administrative procedures act needs to be reformed, and in terms of really reigning in the Administrative State . Thanks. Go ahead, both of you. I cant say that i can go into detail about the administrative procedure act, but i can say the chevron case ignores the administrative procedure act. Thats the central problem with chevron, and it was only within the last few years that the court appeared to become understanding that what they had done was for years left out of consideration an act of congress, administrative procedure act adopted in 1946. They ignored it. So if the administrative procedure act comes back into effect, and i think it should. What the effect of that would be if the courts enforce it is that all decisions by agencies would have to be reviewed first by the courts for their agreement with the power of the that the agency has the power to make that decision. Thats the key question in the chevron case. They push that completely aside and said the courts have to defer, but thats wrong under the constitution, the court should have the first view of whether congress has actually empowered an agency to do something. Ilya . You know, theres enough language in the Supreme Courts recent holdings on environmental regulation, other things, the ur case to get even more lawyerly and things like that, that a judge could hold regulators feet to the fire more, whether through substantial requirements or otherwise. Congress should strengthen that, but i think the Political Capital required to do Something Like that, it wouldnt be that much more, it would be about the same to pass Something Like the reigns act. Requiring congress to approve any major regulations that are promulgated. Bigger things like that are probably a better use of activists or Academic Resources than tinkering with substantial evidence. Another question . I see another hand here in the back. Hello. Would you please comment on the following. I believe that its wrong to Call Congress as the problem because in the mike lee example, well get more 2000 page Affordable Care acts. But the real problem is the United States judiciary with the presumption that the administrative rules are correct. So in effect, the problems is unsolvable. A bleak question, but yes. I agree. It is wrong for the courts to have decided that they should defer to the views of the agencies about their powers. That violated the apa, and it violates the way the framers saw the courts operating in the constitutional system. So from my perspective, i think your question is justified. Yeah. As someone who finds testifying most things the government does to be unconstitutional, i do find fault with the courts in a host of ways. The Reason Congress passes broad laws is because the courts let them. And thats the be all and end all. Thats a project that a lot of us have been trying to push courts not to have. I think you were alluding to the presungs of constitutionality. There should be a presumption of liberality. Government should have to justify their regulations rather than presuming theyre valid unless you can point to a text in the constitution. Thats an act of debate within federal society circles. Legally minded folks. I think you raise a very valid point. Okay. Another question. Mr. Wallison, i appreciate your book on the origins of the Great Recession and the financial crisis. How could reversing this deference how could could we have avoided some of the crises in 2007, 2008, and how could we avoid future financial crises if we reverse this Movement Toward increasing deference from congress to the Administrative State . Thats a really interesting question. For everyones information, i wrote a book about the financial crisis in 2008, and blamed it on the governments housing policies and not on the ineffective or lack of regulation of the banking industry. They were not responsible for it. They. Reporter miss tated in it, but it was the governments housing policies that created this enormous housing bubble that we had that ultimately collapsed and caused the crisis. Yes, it is certainly possible that if there was more attention to administrative agencies, the agencies that are regulating the economy, and they were given less deference which means they would have to justified things much more carefully when they made a regulation, we could have prevented the crisis in 2008. But going back to look at history and redo it is fruitless, but to the future, we ought to be sure that when an agency is making a regulation, it is authorized by congress to do that and if there is no authorization, they shouldnt do it. Well, luckily my former colleague now heads up the federal Housing Finance agency. How is he doing . Im worried about him. Really . Yes. Im worried about what the Trump Administration is cooking up. They seem to believe that they can keep fannie mae and freddie mac in being. That is, these two agencies which are now under the control of their regulator at the federal Housing Finance agency, theyre under the control in regulation of this agency, and they are also controlled completely and supported financially by the federal government right now. And the idea is that they can be let out into the public again and allowed to function as they did before 2008 when they came insolvent. We should close them down and if youre youre if our friend, a good conservative economist, had his way, i assume, he would do that, but unfortunately, i see a lot of statements by him suggesting that the Trump Administration does not want to take on the real estate lobby, and wants to allow fannie mae and freddie mac, the cause of the financial crisis in the past, to come alive again and continue to dominate the housing market. That would be too bad if it happens. Another question . I see a hand here. It seems to me that part of the problem is that people in government and even people outside of government think that government is the solution when government is so seldom the solution to anything, and for that reason, i think youve got mark clab ree ya thinking we could use the agencies to solve issues, and so i think that i wonder how we can effect a change of heart and sort of take the government out of government and give it back to the people. So i wonder if you could comment on that. We just need a simple constitutional amendment to add to the end of every clause, and we mean it. And were good to go. I do think that goes to an interesting question. How should conservatives when they become parts of the Administrative State act within the Administrative State. You mean when youre appointed to an office . Yeah. Well, hopefully i was in the let me put it this way. I was in the reagan administration. Ronald reagan was extremely clear about what he wanted. I was the Treasury Department in the early parts of the administration. And we knew exactly what reagan wanted. His tweets were written well . That is an interesting issue whether reagan would have liked tweeting. In any event, he had made his policies so clear that we hardly ever had to go to the white house for clarification about a decision. Because reagan had laid out the policies that he wanted us to follow. That is not often the case with president s. They come into Office Without having a clear view. However, if a president comes into office and lays out the kind of conservative outlook that president reagan had, then i think the government would be responsive to that. The people who were in the various agencies would feel that they cant make all these regulations. In fact, they would probably withdraw some of the regulations as they are doing in the case of trump right now. But i would add that in the case of trump, in his first two years, we havent really had a substantial reduction in the number of regulations every year. Since 1993 when people began to count, there were more than 3,000 regulations every year from the agencies of the Administrative State, and that was also true in trumps first year, 2017 and very close to 3,000 regulations in trumps second year of 2018. I havent seen whats happened in 2019 yet, but i can imagine there are a lot of regulations and rules coming out, because its very hard to stop this flow once it gets started. And the cabinet officials who are in charge of most of this are busy testifying and traveling around and making speeches and so forth, and they allow these regulations to go through, because theyve been told this is what the agency has been working on for ten years so you dont want to stop it now. Ilya . Well, look, i mean, this ties back to the gentlemans question about the judiciary. This didnt happen overnight. I trace it back to the Supreme Courtsed toification of progressive policy to use on the Administrative State in 1937. Its going to take time to wind that back. Thats the root of the problem. We just have a last few minutes here. I want to give you both a chance to give Closing Remarks about this decision and where everybodys focus should be in the coming years on the administrative side if they care about this issue. My view is that conservatives cannot lose by forcing more of the law making policy into congress. Not only does that mean that more attention will be paid to the major questions which means we can all get involved in the decisions that are made. Theyll be debated on the floor of congress. The members of congress will be accountable for the to us for the decisions that they make, and if it is too difficult for them to adopt the law, good. We want fewer laws. As well as fewer regulations. The left, on the other hand, is going to see things entirely differently, because the Administrative State is made up of people on the left. And when we have seen the few comments they have made now about the new conservative Supreme Court, they have been well the real danger here is that they will stop the government from protecting us against the abuses of industry. That kind of attitude which was expressed by a law professor at the university of Chicago Law School is the attitude that the left is going to have about all of these changes. But i think we can all agree that the fewer laws that are made and the fewer regulations that are made, the better off this country will be. Ilya . A lot of these issues come up in high profile cases and swamped with policy debates. Two broad delegations comes up in tariffs, immigration policy, border wall. Theres so many things that statutes are at play that are so broad that maybe the president whether its trump or obama or whoever, is acting within the law, but the problem is with the law. When we were last at the Leadership Program in colorado springs, that was when trump gave his press conference on the emergency wall declaration. And i was watching this in my hotel room at the broadmore. I put out a statement. The upshot was possibly or probably legal, but unconstitutional. It was kind of a cute way of saying because you cant have a law thats legal and unconstitutional. The constitution is a law. I meant the relevant statutes about moving money around are so broad that it could be that the smart white house lawyers figured out a way to do this, to cross the ts and dot the is. If thats the case, this law is improper. Its Congress Giving away the appropriation power. For oh daca case argued this term. If president obama did under the immigration statutes have the power to provide temporary status and Work Authorization to people who were brought here illegally as children, which policy i support by the way, but if he had that power already, that Immigration Law is too broad and unconstitutional. So cato is filing a brief due on monday on behalf of supporters of daca type policies, supporting as a matter of policy but not as a matter of law, because the executive power simply isnt so broad. These issues crop up. Stil sometimes its technical things and if the Supreme Court starts making waves, it will be on some technical things rather than the high profile culture war things. These issues are all around us. Thank you to our panelists. Thank you all so much. Campaign 2020. Make up your own mind as the voting begins next month, watch our live coverage of the Iowa Caucuses on monday, february 3rd. Cspans campaign 2020. Your unfiltered view of politics. Hi, everyone. Im adam koch. Im here to encourage you to continue to wrap up this competition as the deadline is getting close. Dont worry. Youll have time. This is about the time i started filming my documentary the first year i entered. Im in the d. C. Offices right now. And im just going to tell you that cspan student cam was an Incredible Opportunity for me to express my thoughts and views about the Political Climate in the current day as well as connect with local and state leaders and political office. Im excited youre all interested in this and are pursuing this. Its a once in a lifetime opportunity. Im excited youre all taking it. Theres still time for you to enter the cspan student cam video competition. You have until january 20th to create a five or six minute documentary that explores an issue you want the president ial candidates to address. Were giving away 100,000 in cash prizes. A grand prize of 5 ,000. Go to our website, studentcam. Org. Next, a look at the cost of raising a family, and how to reduce some of the expenses. This is a little over two hours. Good afternoon. Thank you for being here and joining us today for this hearing of the joint economic committee. The American Economy is thriving. The current economic expansion is the longest in u. S. History. Our Unemployment Rate has remained below 4 over the last 18 months. In recent years weve seen consistently solid gdp growth and growth in job creation. And yet, notwithstanding, these successes, for many parents across this country raising