The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a blog post up today with a headline which reads: "Forfeiture: Georgia was once one of the worst. Now? It’s not so bad." Sounds great. When did the Georgia General Assembly pass legislation to improve the forfeiture law in the state by requiring more protections for innocent property owners? Well, it hasn't.

Just because President Obama’s legacy was defeated at the ballot box doesn’t mean that the regulator-in-chief is going to change. In the final weeks of his lame duck presidency, the Obama administration is hustling to complete as many new regulations as possible. This adds on to what is already the all-time record year for regulation based on page count. This continued regulatory aggression against the American people underlines why under this president the regulatory state has grown by an unprecedented amount.

Last week, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction halting the implementation of President Obama’s new overtime regulations. The regulations, previously scheduled to take effect on December 1st are a declaration of war on job flexibility and small employers, imposing new compliance costs and limiting employment arrangements in pursuit of big government social engineering. Given the large costs and dubious benefits, the Obama administration’s justifications for these massive, expensive, meddling regulations were always suspect as policy matter, but now a federal judge has agreed with the 21 states challenging the regulations and recognized them as probably illegal as well.

Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit officially ruled that the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is unconstitutional, a criticism that has been leveled at the agency since its creation in 2010. The court found that so much unaccountable power was concentrated in the person of the director of the CFPB that it could not pass constitutional muster. Under the court’s ruling, the director now will be removable at will by the president, just like the head of any other agency. This represents an important blow for the system of separation of powers enshrined in the US Constitution.

American freight rail, while largely deregulated, is still overseen by the Surface Transportation Board (STB). This federal agency retains substantial power to regulate freight rail, powers that the STB normally deploys rarely. But these powers are seen by some as an opportunity to enlist the power of the federal government in business disputes, using government to extract rents to pad bottom lines. An example of this can be seen in the proposed “reciprocal switching” regulations from the STB. Unable to prove that prices that railroads are charging are unfair, some of their shipping customers have gone to the federal government to try to force lower prices through regulation, regulation which has been described as backdoor price controls.