On the first day of the 111th Congress, House Democrats are already targeting the last-minute regulations passed down by the Bush administration in recent weeks. Among the most controversial of those efforts have been rules to ease environmental restrictions on various industries and expand the rights of healthcare workers to refuse any services they find morally objectionable.

Critical Democrats have been weighing how they might go about overturning some of those regulations — and they have several tools at their disposal. Today, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) chose one route, reintroducing legislation requiring that all regulations arriving in the final three months of the Bush administration must gain approval by the incoming Obama administration.

From Nadler’s statement:

We cannot sit idly by as this administration quietly makes last-ditch efforts to erode civil liberties, empower polluting industries, threaten the environment and weaken a woman’s right to choose.

Not that the introduction of a bill is an overwhelming event on Capitol Hill (God knows that every lawmaker in town has scurried today to re-launch an arsenal of bills left dangling from the last Congress.) But Obama also has his eye trained on many of these regulations, and addressing them will likely be a high priority early this year.