President Clinton's Last Stand

President Clinton is set to follow in the footsteps of many presidents before him and take full advantage of his power to make midnight regulations.

Midnight regulations are rules handed down by the White House and executives throughout the federal government during the last weeks of an administration that carry the force of law.

CBS News Correspondent Eric Engberg reports that during his final days as president, Bill Clinton has been anything but a lame duck. By inauguration day, the president and his administrators will have handed down an expected 29,000 pages of new regulations.

Presidential scholar Stephen Hess told CBS News, "you know that something special is happening when they bunch up at the end, and that 'special' is ... the clock is running out!"

Regulatory Analyst Jay Cochran has been studying presidential transitions since the Truman era and said Democrats and Republicans hand out midnight regulations by the bushel.

"The real problem with midnight regulations is this notion that we're going to dump a whole raft of laws in a very compressed time period on the American people, and then expect them to understand and follow them," said Cochran.

Some environmentalists expect President-elect Bush to oppose much of their agenda; so they're pressing President Clinton for action now on their favorite issues.

The Sierra Club wants to restrict logging in Alaska's Tongass rain forest in Alaska. Other groups want Mr. Clinton to declare the Alaska national refuge off limits for oil production, but Republicans are promising a fight.

Rep. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said, "only Congress can make this decision, so if the president does initiate an action, ... it's going to be challenged."

But challenges are rare. Congress is too busy with its new agenda to worry much about the old.

As presidents' time runs out, they often use midnight regulations as a way to bypass congressional opposition and nail down their own legacies for the history books.