Roy Blunt encouraged his fellow U.S. senators to pass the "Enforce the Law Act," which the U.S. House passed in March.
For some time, Blunt, R-Mo., has been among the leading congressional voices complaining that the Obama administration illegally has been trying to expand regulations.
"But there's no standing for members of Congress to go to court and say, "We've got a concern here, that the law's not being properly enforced - why don't you just decide right now that the law's not being properly enforced rather than wait for the rule to go into effect?'" Blunt told reporters gathered at the Capital Sand Co. plant on the north bank of the Missouri River.
He pointed to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling this year that said President Barack Obama didn't have the power to decide that Congress wasn't in session - so he didn't have the authority to make "out-of-session" appointments to the National Labor Relations Board because the Senate had not said it had ended its sessions.
"The National Labor Relations Board's appointments were, pretty clearly, illegal from the very start," Blunt explained, "but you had two years of various people having to deal with rules and regulations that, eventually, the court said, "You've got to take all those rules and regulations off the books.'"
The "Enforce the Law Act" would establish a procedure to allow Congress to authorize a court case against the executive branch for failure to faithfully execute the laws already on the books, rather than requiring the normal process of waiting for an injured party to go to court and have the case take two to three years to run its course.
Blunt thinks the House-passed bill also would win Senate approval - if Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, would allow the issue to come to a vote.
Blunt also thinks that "Congress should vote on any regulation that has any economic impact. Right now, you've got regulators who not only are out of control, but are unaccountable.
"They know that nobody can get to them in a meaningful way, with anything short of, maybe, an appropriations cut."
But under his idea, new regulations couldn't go into effect unless a majority in both houses of Congress approved them.
"Slowing the process down of having more and more regulations wouldn't be a bad thing," he said. "And, what you also do is, you put a lot of pressure on the regulatory agencies, not to continue to bring things to the Congress that just don't make sense."
He said one "good example" is the Environmental Protection Agency's "clean water proposals that suggest that "navigable' water is anything that can run into water that can be navigable."
Federal administrators have said they need to control chemical runoff and other potential pollution issues before they reach major waterways.
But, Blunt said, "Everything doesn't have to be a federal problem.
"There are people in states and communities that can better decide issues like that, than somebody in Washington, D.C."
Dan Mehan, president of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry, was one of about two dozen people who met with Blunt at the Capital Sand Co. plant.
"We fully support the senator's take on where these regulations are going, and that they're being made at the whim of one branch of government without consulting Congress," Mehan said. "We're at a business in Jefferson City that just wants to play by the rules.
"But you just can't change the rules on a whim."
Randy Allen, president of the Jefferson City Area Chamber of Commerce, attended the event to hear what Blunt had to say.
"We want senators to be in Washington to do our business," he said, "but we're always interested in what he has to say, and what he's talking about."
Blunt's Jefferson City event Tuesday was the first of several he's planned this week around the state, to talk about the "Enforce the Law Act."