Beyond Republicans and the Disapproval of Regulations

A New Empirical Approach to the Congressional Review Act
March 27, 2023

Originally published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies


Under the Congressional Review Act (CRA), legislators deploy expedited procedures to repeal agency regulations. For decades, the conventional wisdom—drawn from a handful of cases in which rules were repealed—has been that the CRA is primarily used by Republicans to nullify regulations issued at the close of Democratic presidential administrations. In this article, we demonstrate that the conventional wisdom provides an incomplete account of the use of the CRA.

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