With Tuesday's thumping of the GOP signalling the beginning of the post-Bush era, expectations are running strong that Sarbanes-Oxley will now get its long-awaited overhaul.

The Democrats will unwind Sarb-Ox says former Fed chief Alan Greenspan.

Greenspan has told us to expect changes to Section 404 and has basically summed up the problem quite neatly: Sarbanes-Oxley is a dog because it was rushed through without any cost-benefit analysis.

"Sarbanes-Oxley passed both houses with almost unanimous votes. Any bill that goes through Congress with that sort of vote cannot be good," he said.

Still, the prospective changes to Sarbanes-Oxley have been on the cards for some time. The new Speaker for the House, Nancy Pelosi, was pushing for changes to the law during the campaign. It was smart politics! What she was doing in effect was outflanking the Republicans. The inability of the Republicans to change Sarbanes-Oxley when they were in power gave the Democrats the perfect opportunity to wrong-foot a stagnant GOP by advocating regulatory relief on this issue. It sent a clear message to business and even earned gushing praise from the conservative think-tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Indeed, one of the fascinating outcomes of Tuesday's mid-term elections was that it confirmed that the Republicans no longer have a monopoly on redneck culture!

The Democrats had recruited moderate, even conservative candidates to take up the fight in Republican heartland. A lot of the new Democrat Congressmen are anti-abortion, pro-gun, and anti-free trade. For example, Bob Casey who defeated Republican Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania was running heavily on a protectionist message as was Heath Shuler, the former NFL quarterback who took out North Carolina's 11th District. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out when Congress starts dealing with questions of trade.

Still, as SmartMoney.com editor Ray Hennessey says, the influx of moderates could be very good for business.

"For all the talk that the GOP is the party of business, they really didn't come through. If there's one piece of legislation corporate America hates above all else it's Sarbanes-Oxley. And that was pushed through with Republican support and signed by a Republican president. Plus, Republican lawmakers had forgotten their fiscal-conservative roots. They spent too much. Wall Street doesn't like public spending.

"And Democrats are going to be just as good for businesses as Republicans were. Most Democrats went out of their way to actually run on their pro-business credentials. Only Nixon could go to China, only Clinton could reform welfare. This Democratic Congress will want to show that it's not all bad.

"After all, it's the only way many of them will get re-elected."

Still, when it comes to Sarbanes-Oxley, the Democrats might not change anything. It looks like the regulators are going to do the hard work for them and change the 404 requirements, says Forbes.

"In fact, Congress does not have to do anything to reform the law. The SEC can fix Sarb-Ox itself without overstepping Congress' legislative authority."

Significantly, Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Christopher Cox has told the New York Times that a new auditing standard is on the way to help smaller companies, and that the timetable would be for the SEC to approve that standard by spring.

So whichever direction they come from from, changes to Sarbanes-Oxley seem inevitable.