Dozens of regulations, however, such as the Bush administration’s revisions to endangered species regulations designed to reduce the input of scientists and to keep the law from being used to fight global warming, and another that reversed a 25-year-old rule restricting loaded guns in national parks, have already been approved.

To get rid of these regulations, the Obama administration will have to begin a whole new rule-making process, which could take months or years to complete. So while Bush may be out of office, his influence will likely continue to be felt for some time.

The same is true, it seems, of the Democrats’ strategy for a host of other “midnight regulations” coming from the White House in recent months.

From The New York Times:

“Congress is going to have to roll up its sleeves and review these midnight regulations,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said in an interview, “because it’s clear that they are part of a desire for the administration, as it heads out the door, to put some ideological trophies on the wall.”

Mr. Wyden, the chairman of a subcommittee on natural resources, said he was focusing on a series of recently issued environmental rules. Among them are measures relaxing protections for endangered species, allowing uranium mining near the Grand Canyon, and making it easier for coal companies to dump mining debris in nearby streams and valleys. [...]

Spokesmen for the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, said they shared their colleagues’ desire to overturn some of the regulations but were waiting for guidance from the administration before adopting a specific strategy.

President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, said in a statement that their team was in the process of reviewing “these new regulations that are being issued during the final days” of the Bush administration and “will take appropriate steps to address any concerns in a timely manner.”

Rep. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) vows to tap the Congressional Review Act to overturn the rule easing protections on endangered species, according to The Times. Yet that law, which allows Congress to nullify White House regulations arriving in the final months of the president’s term, wouldn’t be the most efficient way to tackle Bush’s controversial rules. As The Times points out, the CRA would force lawmakers to debate and vote on each rule separately — a time-consuming process for a Congress with a full slate already.

The quicker route might be to adopt legislation, introduced last week by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), that would hinge the finalization of President George W. Bush’s midnight rules on approval by the incoming Obama  administration.

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.