Here’s an interesting claim from John Judis:

Yet there is one extremely consequential area where Obama has done just about everything a liberal could ask for–but done it so quietly that almost no one, including most liberals, has noticed. Obama’s three Republican predecessors were all committed to weakening or even destroying the country’s regulatory apparatus: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and the other agencies that are supposed to protect workers and consumers by regulating business practices. Now Obama is seeking to rebuild these battered institutions. In doing so, he isn’t simply improving the effectiveness of various government offices or making scattered progress on a few issues; he is resuscitating an entire philosophy of government with roots in the Progressive era of the early twentieth century. Taken as a whole, Obama’s revival of these agencies is arguably the most significant accomplishment of his first year in office.

I’m still reading…

Update: But I’ve gotten lots of email along these lines:

Mr. Goldberg:
As an attorney who’s studied securities law (and even authored a paper on securities fraud), I find the claim that Obama’s Republican predecessors weakened and/or destroyed the SEC totally false. Sarbanes-Oxley was signed by George W. Bush. It is an open secret among securities practitioners that it was a bloated mess of a bill, representing an inefficient legislative (and regulatory) overreaction to the accounting scandals of the early 2000’s. That means, then, that one can certainly criticize Bush’s regulatory philosophy, but not as too weak – on the contrary, it was too much of the wrong kind of regulation. Would that the myth of unregulated securities markets were true! It would make securities attorneys’ jobs a lot easier. My strong impression is that regulation in many areas was tweaked during the Bush years, some rules strengthened, some relaxed, in a mixture of well-intentioned and misguided attempts to balance consumer protection against the benefits of free markets. Sarbanes-Oxley was one of the most boneheaded moves, but it was in the direction of more regulation, so it hardly counts as evidence for the big government, strong regulatory hand position.
If Obama really is turning the regulatory clock back to the New Deal, that’s bad news.