Sen. Lee Comments on DC Circuit’s Net Neutrality Decision
WASHINGTON – Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) issued the following statement Tuesday in response to the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decision to uphold the Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality regulation.
“I was disappointed in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals decision to uphold the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order, a regulation that has already led to a decline in innovation at the expense of ordinary Americans.
“Judge Williams’ 69-page dissent will not be forgotten though, particularly his conclusion that: ‘the Commission’s unreasoned patchwork … shunts broadband service into the legal track suited to natural monopolies.’ This will only result in a far less free and open Internet, as it ensures government protection of incumbent firms.
“Today’s decision reinforces the importance of the Restoring Internet Freedom Act, a bill that I recently introduced in the Senate, which aims to nullify the FCC’s Open Internet Order in order to foster the development of a more democratic, fact-based, and economically reasonable approach to ensuring transparency and consumer protection in the Internet ecosystem.
“Today’s decision also illustrates the dysfunction that arises when Congress delegates vast discretionary authority to unelected federal bureaucrats, and points to the need for Congress to reclaim its lawmaking powers currently exercised by rule-writing agencies in the Executive Branch. To that end, earlier this year I joined nine of my colleagues to launch the Article 1 Project: a new network of House and Senate conservatives working together on a new agenda of government reform and congressional rehabilitation.
“The policies advanced by A1P members seek to reassert Congress’s legislative authority, ensuring that the American people’s elected representatives are responsible, and accountable, for the country’s laws.”
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Sen. Mike Lee /
June 14, 2016
http://dailysignal.com/2016/06/14/a-victory-for-the-american-people-against-the-export-import-bank
It’s not every day that the American people score a victory over the global elite, but that’s exactly what happened last week.
The victory came in the form of preventing the ascension of Mark McWatters to the Board of Directors of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, whose nomination Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., has successfully bottled up in the Senate Banking Committee.
Created by executive order during the height of the Great Depression, the Ex-Im Bank has been used as a tool to reward politically connected elites, both in the United States and abroad, for decades.
Here’s how it works: a large corporation pays money to lobbyists and politicians so that Ex-Im will leverage the full faith and credit of American taxpayers to guarantee loans used to finance global transactions.
Because these loans are backed by you, the United States taxpayer, these politically favored global corporations are able to secure below-market interest rates. The difference between the market interest rate the global corporations would have paid to finance their transactions and the below-market interest rate made available by Ex-Im’s guarantees acts as a giant taxpayer subsidy for these global corporations.
The lobbyists and politicians supporting these global corporations will tell you that Ex-Im’s loan guarantees are cost-free programs that support American middle-class jobs.
Not quite.
First of all, as any economist will tell you, there is no such thing as a free lunch. As the Congressional Research Service has explained, “Subsidized export financing merely shifts production among sectors within the economy, rather than adding to the overall level of economic activity, and subsidizes foreign consumption at the expense of domestic consumption.”
Secondly, if these global corporations are so concerned about American middle-class jobs, then why do they spend millions of dollars lobbying foreign governments to create and maintain their own version of our Export-Import Bank? These corporations aren’t concerned as much about American jobs as they are about maximizing the number of foreign governments that subsidize their business.
And who exactly is on the other end of all these Ex-Im financed deals? China mostly.
China is by far the biggest beneficiary of Ex-Im guaranteed loans. And since most of that financing benefits state-owned firms, the Ex-Im Bank is one of the largest subsidizers of Chinese communist officials in the world.
For instance, in 2013, the Export-Import Bank financed a $63 million deal to help build a semiconductor manufacturing plant in China. How exactly does subsidizing Chinese semiconductor manufactures help save American jobs?
It doesn’t.
But it does help line the pockets of the governing elite both here and in China. That is what the Export-Import Bank is all about.
By blocking the nomination of McWatters to the Export-Import Bank’s board of directors, Shelby has denied Ex-Im the quorum it needs to authorize loan guarantees over $10 million. Between 2007 and 2014, 84 percent of the bank’s subsidy and loan-guarantee deals exceeded $10 million, and the vast majority were given to the wealthiest, most well-connected businesses that should have no problem acquiring financing on the open market.
The American people have not succeeded in shutting down this spigot of cash to the world’s global elite yet, but we are gaining votes in the House and Senate every year.
We will win eventually.
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Economists Praise Sen. Lee’s Drug Cost Reduction Bill
WASHINGTON – The International Center for Law and Economics (ICLE), a think tank dedicated to economically-grounded policymaking, praised Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) new CREATES Act Tuesday. The bill would lower the drug costs of millions of Americans by making it easier for generic drugs to reach the market.
The CREATES Act “would mitigate the competitive leverage that brand manufacturers are currently able to exercise under the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act’s imperfectly drafted REMS provisions,” ICLE executive director Geoffrey Manne said. “Unlike many other legislative fixes, Senator Lee’s bill takes a narrow targeted approach to correcting problems directly, rather than creating a vast new scope of antitrust liability for drug manufacturers,” Manne finished.
The 2007 FDAAA empowered the FDA to demand a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy (REMS) from a drug manufacturer whenever “new safety information” came to light about one of their existing products. Intended to increase patient safety, some drug companies soon learned they could use REMS to restrict distribution of their brand drugs, including refusing to sell samples to generic drug manufacturers.
Without these samples, generic drug manufacturers cannot comply with the FDA’s existing process for getting generic drugs approved for the market. By delaying the entry of generic drugs into the market, drug companies are then able to charge higher monopoly prices for their drugs for longer periods of time.
While attempts have been made to combat this abuse through use of the antitrust laws, the underlying issue is a regulatory one. The CREATES Act addresses the problem by allowing generic drug companies to sue brand pharmaceutical manufacturers who are refusing to sell them drug samples.
The CREATES Act is cosponsored by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).
Click here for the electronic version of this release.
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June 17, 2016
"to elevate the condition of men--to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all, to afford all an unfettered start and a fair chance, in the race of life." --Abraham Lincoln
Chairman's Note: Tall Tales Gun Grabbers Tell
One might hope that after the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, Democrats would get serious about protecting Americans from ISIS. But instead of uniting with Republicans to identify common ground in the fight against terrorism, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) launched a 15-hour filibuster Wednesday demanding an end to what he called the “gun show loophole.”
Now Murphy was honest enough to admit that the Orlando shooter did pass a background check, but then Murphy went on to say:
“Let's say that the Orlando shooter was on a list that prohibited him from buying a weapon and he went to a store and was denied that AR-15-style weapon because he was on that list. But all he would have to do is go to a weekend gun show or go online, and he would be able to get that weapon without a background check.”
This is just plain false. There is no such thing as a “gun show” or “online” loophole to federal background check requirements. Federal law does not care where or when a gun transaction happens, only who is involved in that transaction.
So if you go to a “weekend gun show” and buy a gun from one of the many licensed gun dealers there, you will still have to undergo a background check. Same if you buy a gun online.
What matters is who is selling the gun and how often they sell them. If you sell your friends or neighbors an occasional firearm, you don’t need to conduct a background check. But if you are “engaged in the business” of selling firearms, then you do need to administer a background check on every sale.
And that wasn’t the only tall tale Murphy told. Murphy also claimed that: "AR-15-style weapons weren't legal in the United States until 2004 after being banned for 10 years. It is not coincidental that there was a massive increase in mass shootings in this country after 2004.”
Again, this is just plain false. According to Northeastern University criminology professor James Alan Fox there were about 18 mass shooting a year in the two decades before the assault weapons ban, 19 mass shootings a year in the decade during the assault weapons ban, and 21 mass shooting a year after the ban.
Murphy’s post-assault weapons ban shooting spike is pure myth.
Finally, Murphy also claimed, “in States that have imposed those reasonable limitations” on guns “there are less gun crimes. There are less homicides.”
This is also false. While it is true that states with more guns do have more “gun deaths,” once you remove suicides from the equation, the correlation disappears. When you look at just “gun crimes” and “homicides” strict gun control laws have no effect.
Emotions are always high after a deadly attack. Americans want to do something to stop the pain.
But acting on emotion, and not facts, is terrible public policy and a danger to all of our constitutional rights.
Issue in Focus: Reining in Prescription Drug Costs with CREATES Act
One of the most urgent problems facing our health care system today, and one of the primary causes of rising health insurance premiums in the United States, is the skyrocketing cost of prescription drugs. One in four patients say that they have refrained from filling a prescription because it was too expensive, and nearly three-quarters of Americans believe prescription drug costs are unreasonably high.
There are many problems contributing to the unrelenting cost inflation of prescription drugs – including the FDA’s outdated, byzantine approval process for new drugs, which can last as long as 13 years – but one of the most egregious, and easy to fix, is the ability of brand-name drug companies to unfairly block generic drug companies from entering the market with more affordable products.
This is largely a problem of the government’s own making. The FDA is allowed to require drug manufacturers to submit to what’s called a Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, which may include restricted distribution. This scenario makes the brand the sole gatekeeper for a generic competitor attempting to enter the market – even after patent expiration – and brands sometimes use this situation to refuse to sell samples to generics. This prevents generics from conducting the laboratory tests that are required to gain FDA approval. Or the brand name firms will block generics from participating in their FDA-mandated safety protocol, which is a prerequisite for government approval.
Restricting generic drug manufacturers from accessing samples of new drugs allows brand name companies to dramatically inflate the prices of their drugs. For instance, in 2015 Turing Pharmaceutical increased the price of its anti-parasitic drug Daraprim 5000 percent overnight, from $13.50 to $750 per pill.
To combat outrageous, abusive practices like this, I recently teamed up with a bipartisan group of senators to introduce the Creating and Restoring Access to Equivalent Samples (CREATES) Act of 2016. The CREATES Act provides an efficient pathway for generic drug manufacturers facing one of these delay tactics to bring an action in federal court seeking injunctive relief, in order to obtain the sample necessary for bioequivalent testing or enter court-supervised negotiations for a shared safety protocol.
If we’re ever going to bring the cost of health-insurance premiums and prescription drugs under control we must reform the Food and Drug Administration’s excessively onerous, time-consuming regulatory process. The CREATES Act is an essential first step in that process. It is a commonsense, bipartisan measure that will provide real, immediate relief to a serious problem.
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Sen. Lee Votes For Common Sense Crime Bills
WASHINGTON Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) supported cloture on two common sense crime bills Monday authored by Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA). Lee also voted against cloture on two gun control measures sponsored by Sens. Chris Murphy (D-CT) and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA).
“So many of our past mass shootings could have been prevented by robust enforcement of our existing gun laws,” Lee said. “Chairman Grassley should be commended for putting together a common sense crime bill that aims to increase enforcement while protecting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans.”
Sen. Cornyn’s bill is a step toward reducing future tragedies,” Lee added. “I look forward to working with him to tighten these protections in the future.”
“Unfortunately I was not able to vote for either of the gun control measures offered by Sens. Murphy and Feinstein,” Lee continued. “Murphy’s amendment requiring universal background checks is far too broad and would sweep far too many otherwise law abiding Americans into its scope. Feinstein’s bill is also problematic since it would deprive far too many Americans of their constitutional rights without offering adequate judicial review.”
