Watchdogs Fear Red-State Rollback

"It's disgraceful what's going on in our companies," said Ed Mierzwinski, the consumer program director for the U.S. Public Interest Resource Group, a consumer advocacy organization. "The climate is not right for letting them get away with what they want to get away with."

And even though Republicans made gains in Congress, that doesn't necessarily mean it will be more likely to oppose further reforms. Among the most vocal defenders on Capitol Hill of FASB's stock options effort, for instance, are Republican senators such as John McCain of Arizona, Alabama's Richard Shelby and Illinois' Peter Fitzgerald.

"We didn't know that Sen. Fitzgerald would be a champion for investors," said the Consumer Union's Greenberg. "It's hard to say" how the new Congress will act, she added.

Indeed, some think that Congress will have little appetite to roll back parts of Sarbanes-Oxley or even to step in on the options or proxy access fights.

While there is a "fair amount of muttering about the need to change or modify Sarbanes-Oxley, that's not going to happen," said the former policymaker. "Congressional Republicans are not interested in that and the administration is not interested in that."

Still, few believe that the reform movement will continue with the momentum it has had.

"I think we're into a whole new world. We'll just have to wait and see how it turns out," Turner said. "The investor community is probably going to be more challenged than it has been in the last dozen years."