ABSTRACT
Housing and Urban Development was required to forward all final regulations to the same committees and to delay implementation for twenty calendar days of continuous session. Moreover, at the time of the hearing before the housing subcommittee of the House, the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House Judiciary Committee had just completed action on the Fair Housing Act of 1979, which indicated a strong congressional concern about discrimination in housing. In their study of legislative vetoes over agency rulemaking, Harold H. Bruff and Ernest Gelhorn found that the congressional motivation for adopting such veto power was often mistrust of agency intentions or displeasure with agency decisions in politically sensitive areas. Whatever the merits of the controversy, the very process of utilizing legislative veto power suggests that there are serious implications in the adoption of congressional veto review for regulatory arenas as energy planning or environmental and consumer protection.
