Later this morning, the House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to hold a mark-up on the so-called "Regulatory Freeze for Jobs Act of 2012" (H.R. 4078), a farce of a bill that wrongly calls for a moratorium on public protections until the unemployment rate reaches six percent. This is the latest in a series of more than 190 attacks on regulatory safeguards in the House since the beginning of 2011.

On Tuesday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released a report that concludes that deregulation will not create jobs. The report is the latest piece of evidence that the ongoing congressional attacks on public protections are misguided, at best.

There are rumblings that as soon as today, the Senate GOP may begin to offer up the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act (S. 299) as an amendment to, or a substitute for, bills moving to the Senate floor for a vote. Such a move would limit the public's ability to have a say on this damaging legislation.

Today, Sens. Rob Portman (R-OH), Mark Pryor (D-AR), and Susan Collins (R-ME), and Reps. Collin Peterson (D-MN) and Lamar Smith (R-TX) announced their intention to propose a major revision of the Administrative Procedure Act – the basic legal framework that defines how federal rules are made – that would prevent or delay by years important health, safety, and environmental standards. It's hard to imagine a more damaging attack on the federal government's responsibility to protect the public from a wide range of threats.