A curious thing happened in the runup to the midterm elections. The Democrats suddenly got religion on the need to lighten the regulatory load on businesses.
Specifically, the "Innovation Agenda" that the new Democratic Speaker of the House, California's Nancy Pelosi, trumpeted during the campaign vowed to reform Sarbanes-Oxley, the package of corporate governance reforms Congress passed in 2002 after the accounting frauds at Enron and WorldCom.
New York's governor-elect, Eliot Spitzer, who was the bane of Wall Street as the state's attorney general, also made a surprise move when he criticized Sarbanes-Oxley's "unbelievable burden on small companies" and its possible role in "preventing some initial public offerings." Already, President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson have said Sarb-Ox needs reforming.
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