midnight regulations

While most of Washington was partying yesterday, President Obama took action to reverse some of his predecessor’s last acts, much like former President George W. Bush did in 2001. Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel quietly issued a memo yesterday to halt those last-minute regulations that Bush tried to cram through during his final days [...]

Earlier this month, we ran a piece indicating that congressional Democrats have plans to reverse a controversial Bush administration rule that could limit women’s access to reproductive health services — but they’re not sure yet how they’ll do it.
The same is true, it seems, of the Democrats’ strategy for a host of other “midnight regulations” [...]

That didn’t take long.
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 [...]