Constitutional Opinion No. 2026-0906
Case Information
- Source
- congress.gov / U.S. Government Publishing Office (BILLS-114s1817rs)
- Author
- 114th Congress (Sen. Heidi Heitkamp et al., bipartisan)
- Publication Date
- 2016-06-20
- Content Type
- Legal / Normative Text
- Opinion Issued
- 2026-07-22
- AFCS Version
- 1.0
Holding
The retrospective-review companion to the regulatory-improvement commission (2026-0905), landing a hair below its sibling because it advances regulatory discipline through a softer, agency-self-review mechanism. Agencies must go back and measure whether their own major rules ($100M+ impact) achieved what they promised, or have become unnecessary or replaceable by lighter alternatives, publishing frameworks and metrics into a central OIRA database. It advances the limits of Washington by imposing the honest, evidence-based reckoning of whether a rule's benefits still justify its burden (XII); property and the right to build by targeting major rules whose costs fall on enterprise and asking whether less burdensome alternatives preserve the benefit (IX); plus honest money and citizen sovereignty (X, II). Held below its commission sibling by the softness of the mechanism: retrospective review conducted by the very agencies that wrote the rules is a self-policing discipline — OIRA oversight and honest metrics mitigate but do not eliminate it, and there is no fast-track vehicle to force action on what the reviews find. No Rule 6 trigger. Legal/Normative Text (85/15), no JI. Mostly America First (74).
It is the judgment of this Court that Opinion No. 2026-0906 is hereby entered into the record, in accordance with the America First Constitutional Standard. The score stands. The reasoning is published. The record is public.