Round Midnight.(Bill Clinton's last minute activities)

As Bill Clinton prepared to leave office and public attention swiveled toward the incoming administration, the outgoing president spent his last months in the Oval Office making recess appointments and issuing a flurry of new regulations and executive orders. Many of these have been in the works for years but were blocked by the Republican Congress. With very few exceptions, these orders and appointments represented the suppressed liberal aspirations of the Clinton administration.

But will President George W. Bush sit by and allow such aspirations to be realized? He can't simply revoke the measures. As the Supreme Court ruled in 1983 when President Ronald Reagan tried to rescind a postelection auto safety regulation issued by Jimmy Carter, a new administration must go through the usual elaborate rule-making procedures (with hearings and review) before revising regulations issued by the previous administration. But a new president can undermine new rules by staying their implementation until the completion of a court challenge or by denying the appropriate agency the personnel to enforce them. So Bush could, if he chooses, effectively delay or undo much of Clinton's work of the last few months. How the new president deals with these "midnight regulations" will tell a lot about how conservative or conciliatory his administration will be.

Clinton used his presidential power to make about a hundred of these new rules and appointments in the twilight of his term. Perhaps the most dramatic was an order protecting 60 million acres of wilderness (an area about twice the size of New York State) from road building, logging, and oil drilling. This initiative drew the wrath of oil and timber companies and their allies in the West, who are already seeking to overturn it in court. But…