Dr. Frankenstein originally had good intentions. He meant well.
Who can blame him for wanting to reanimate the dead? The idea was undoubtedly popular among the deceased of his time and beguiles community organizers even today.
In short, it wasn't a bad concept. It's just that things got out of hand.
Richard Nixon had the best of intentions, too, when he gave life to the Environmental Protection Agency over 40 years ago. He could not have foreseen that his beautiful brainchild would grow into such a grotesque monster.
Knowing Nixon, though, we can readily imagine him – with a five o'clock shadow at ten in the morning -- running up and down the halls of the White House on that fateful day, shouting, "It's alive! It's alive!"
As we all know from Mary Shelley's book and the never-ending film adaptations thereof (Abbott & Costello's being the definitive version), Frankenstein's monster eventually went rogue, rousing the townsfolk from their customary lethargy and emboldening them to gather their pitchforks and dispatch the beast.
Something vaguely similar is occurring with Nixon's monster.
The agency has been running amok for so long that the citizenry has had enough.
They've raised such a hue and cry that our indifferent public servants in Congress and the courts finally have awakened. A growing number of public servants now seem determined to tame the beast before the townsfolk take up their pitchforks--as in vote out of office--those who fail to see the monster that EPA has become.
Just this week, concluding that the EPA had once again exceeded its "statutory authority," the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the agency's Cross-State Air Pollution Rule.
This is the second judicial slapdown of EPA overreaching in less than a month, the fourth in recent memory.
The question now is: Can the beast be kept in check?
