The irony of WaPo having recently brought down Richard Nixon, who gave them the Environmental Protection Agency:

From The Washington Post – April 4, 1977:

The Lousewort and the Law

THE FURBISH LOUSEWORT may be a lovely plant, if you like scraggly [weeds]… and the snail darter may be more delightful than the average three-inch fish. But something is awry when a clump of louseworts along the Upper St. John River can louse up planning for the Dickey-Lincoln Dam – or when a federal court, to save the snail darter, stops the nearly complete Tellico Dam down on the Little Tennessee River.

Misty-eyed environmentalists are delighted to see such obscure bits of nature hold sway over huge public works. They are also coming to regard the endangered species act as a weapon of last resort against projects that they oppose on broader grounds. The more pragmatic dam-fighters recognize, however, that many more snail-darter-type showdowns or more lousewort jokes can endanger the law itself. Already some members of Congress are grumbling that when they approved the act, they had in mind good causes such as saving bald eagles and keeping commercial foragers from ripping off great act in the West. They didn’t mean to give automatic priority to a whole assortment of undistinguished flora and fauna with precarious existences and funny names.