Democrats May Use GOP Rule to Roll Back Bush Regulations

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Robert's Eighth Rule of Politics says that pols and their parties never give much thought to how their actions—laws they pass, precedents they set—might boomerang against them when the other party comes to power.

I thought about this today when I read that Democrats are considering using the 1996 Congressional Review Act to roll back some of the Bush administration's last-minute regulations. The law in question was passed by the GOP-controlled Congress in the spirit of the Contract With America, the idea being that Congress could use it to block or delay the noxious sort of regulations that the Democratic Clinton White House was pumping out. It seems safe to say that the authors of the law (which has seen little use anyway) did not have in mind the sort of pro-business regulations that may now be reversed. 

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