NYT editorial: Undoing the Damage Done

Eight years is never enough. And in time-honored fashion, the Bush administration used its last two months in office to rush through a series of regulatory changes. In equally time-honored fashion, Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, has ordered all agencies and departments to review these rules and, where possible, suspend or stop the ones they don’t like.

Any rules that were not completed by Jan. 20 can simply be withdrawn or rewritten. Those that have become law can be undone in three ways, all laborious.

One is to undertake a new rule-making process — preliminary proposals, public comment and hearings, a final proposal, etc. — which could take months or even years. The second is to ask Congress to revoke the rule under the rarely used Congressional Review Act. The third is to wait for an outside group to bring suit, then step aside and not defend the rule in court.

Here is a selection of last-minute rules that in our view are worth overturning one way or another.

Health care: One particularly objectionable rule took effect the day President Bush left town. It gives an increased number of medical institutions and a broad range of health care workers the right to refuse to provide abortion referrals, unbiased counseling or emergency contraception, even to rape victims — further restricting women’s rights to health care. The administration should suspend enforcement and craft a new rule.

(More here.)