House Republican Leader John Boehner sent a letter to President Obama expressing alarm at the expansion of the regulatory state.

Excerpt:

It has recently come to our attention that the Administration’s published regulatory agenda includes a total of 191 planned rulemakings, each with an estimated annual cost to our economy of $100 million or more, and that a number of these planned rulemakings may each have an annual economic cost in excess of $1 billion. During a recent job forum conducted through our America Speaking Out initiative, the uncertainty resulting from such rulemakings was cited by private sector job creators as one of the primary impediments to job creation currently facing small businesses.

A widely published AP story last week included the growth of regulations as one of the major points of dispute between the business community and President Obama.

Washington — Labeled anti-business by Republicans and some corporate chiefs, President Barack Obama mounted a campaign to show he wasn’t. But his charm offensive has hit a rocky patch.

Business leaders gripe about burdensome new financial and health care regulations, what they see as unfriendly tax policies and vast government spending. They were put off by Obama’s harsh depiction of “fat cat bankers” and “reckless practices,” a label he applied both to Wall Street and to oil-spill giant BP.

White House aides dispute an anti-business bias, noting that corporate profits are up 65 percent from two years ago. “The stakes are too high for us to be working against each other,” top presidential advisers Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett wrote to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

It’s not just regulation of  health care and financial services that’s in dispute, of course. Energy and environmental regulations are as disconcerting and disruptive to the economy.

From the Washington Post’s Federal Eye blog, “Obama Halts New or Pending Bush Regulations,” news that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has issued a memo (available here) announcing that President Barack Obama has ordered a freeze on new or proposed regulations at all government agencies and departments. The memo declares:

“…no proposed or final regulation should be sent to the Office of Federal Register for publication unless and until it has been reviewed and approved by a department or agency head appointed or designated by the President after noon on January 20, 2009, or in the case of the Department of Defense, the Secretary of Defense.”

The Post’s Ed O’Keefe also reports that the memo orders the “withdrawal of all final or proposed regulations not yet published by the Federal Register. Department and agency heads have also been asked to ‘consider extending for 60 days the effective date of regulations that have been published in the Federal Register but not yet taken effect’ unless they impact health, safety, environmental, financial, or national security matters — obviously now subject to the interpretation of Obama’s appointees.”

That a new Administration stops and reviews its predecessors’ regulations not yet in effect is an entirely reasonable and predictable act. Indeed, the Bush Administration moved deliberately on its final year’s regulatory agenda to put most of rules IN PLACE by the time it left office.

Norman Ornstein makes an interesting, related point in his NYT column Sunday about President Bush and his team’s handling of the transition to the Obama Administration, “Mr. Bush’s Gentlemanly Goodbye“:

To be sure, President Bush has signed some last-minute executive orders, especially in the environmental area, that will create headaches for Mr. Obama. But as a top Obama transition official told me, these were limited in number and scope and all done in the open.

We read those background comments from the Obama camp as undercutting frenzied efforts by activists like the Association for Justice and ProPublica to delegitimize the substance of Bush rulemaking  through a process attack against  “Midnight Regulations.”

In the end, if the Obama Administration challenges established rules, it will do so through the standard regulatory process based on the substance — not the process — of those rules. We’ll applaud or criticize those decisions based on the substance.

We have a post over at Point of Law.com on the voting on legal-reform issues by Rahm Emanuel, President-elect Obama’s designee as White House chief of staff. He’s voted for some tort reform measures, opposed others.

UPDATE (11:04 a.m.): It’s all in the eye of the Eric be-Holder. Writing at “Green Change,” Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco, attacks Emanuel for all sorts of sins, describing him as “one of the most conservative Democratic members of Congress.” If he were a Republican, Zunes would have hauled out the dreaded “neo-con” slur.

It is unclear how serious of a blow Obama’s selection of Emanuel is to those who hoped that Obama might actually steer the country in a more progressive direction. It’s easy to see it as nothing less than a slap in the face of the progressive anti-war elements of the party to whom Obama owes his election, particularly following his selection of Sen. Joe Biden as vice president.

Better get working on your “progressive” candidate for 2012, professor.

Rahm Emanuel walking the darkened streets of Chicago is the lead photo of the weekend Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the major business-oriented general circulation newspaper in Germany. (Think Wall Street Journal once Murdoch gets done broadening its appeal.) Caption:

The face of the new government: Rahm Emanuel is a triathelete, but he’ll also have to prove his political conditioning as the designated chief of staff for a President Barack Obama. In the future he won’t only be moving in the darkened corners of Chicago but also in the White House, trying to control the “machine.” Emanuel has a reputation as an enforcer, which may not necessarily please his future underlings. But his first message to political opponents was one of reconciliation; he spoke of “unity.”

The German editors were surely aware of the historical resonance of putting a successful Jewish political figure on the front page of its newspaper along with the words “reconciliation” and “unity,” just as the Germans marked the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

The headline of the accompanying article, by the way, was “The Enforcer.”

The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund wrote approvingly of Emanuel’s appointment in “Political Diary,” suggesting he would resist the push to have a new Obama Administration let Congressional Democrats set the political agenda, a move that crippled the Clinton Administration in 1993.

The subsequent lurch to the left did incalculable damage to his presidency.

That may be one reason why Mr. Obama has chosen Rahm Emanuel, a respected member of the Congressional leadership, to become his new White House Chief of Staff. Mr. Emanuel has a reputation as a tough partisan, but he has also exhibited impatience with left-wing members of his party who have overly ambitious ideological agendas. A likely first assignment for Mr. Emanuel will be reminding House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that, after only two years of Democratic control, Congress already has a lower approval rating than even President Bush’s.

To the extent Mr. Obama becomes a successful president, it will be because he remains his own man and trusts the brilliant political instincts that have gotten him this far, this fast.

As a member of Congress, Rep. Emanuel voted consistently with the Democratic position on key issues identified by the NAM (that is, usually but not exclusively against the NAM). But there’s still much for the business community to like in his voting record, including his support for free trade agreements with Peru, Chile and Singapore. He also showed himself willing to buck the trial lawyers, voting for the Class Action Fairness Act and limits on frivolous lawsuits against the food industry. (See “Rahm Emanuel, tort reformer” at Point of Law.com).