Buried deep inside a report in the Washington Post today (“EPA Won’t Act on Emissions This Year”) was one of those sorts of Dickensian names familiar to fans of the Bush administration. Among the people trying to keep the Environmental Protection Agency from doing what the Supreme Court essentially mandated — ie, regulating gas emissions — was a fellow from Cheney’s office named Chase Hutto III.

Hutto is identified in the article as a Cheney energy adviser and, more to the point, a former intern at the CATO institute and a Bush campaign volunteer in the Florida recount of 2000. The GOP goon squad that descended on Florida in those days, best remembered for the “Brooks Brothers riot” in which they disrupted the Dade County recount and scared election officials away from doing their job, was filled with HItler youth types, whose principal credentials were loyalty to Bush. (Jim Wilkinson, who was instrumental in organizing the “riot” and other political pranks, went on to run press operations at CentCom before the invasion of Iraq.)

Hutto’s interest in matters related to energy come from his family; his grandfather patented at least seven piston inventions for the Ford Motor Company, and in the words of one of the participants at the meetings in which it was agreed that the EPA would take more time to study the effects of emissions (rather than actually doing anything), he has “an anti-regulatory philosophy and concern about what regulation means for the American way of life. He would talk, for example, about not wanting greenhouse gas controls to do away with the large American automobile.”

I wonder where he got that attitude.

I Googled Chase Hutto and didn’t find much: He has worked for Senator Spencer Abraham for years, starting in Abraham’s ’94 election campaign as “an opposition research consultant.” (This last gig no doubt appealed to Cheney, who has an appreciation for all practitioners of the dark art often simply called oppo.) His interests seem to be immigration and energy. And according to AP, he ran with the bulls in Pamplona in 2003. “Chase Hutto, a senior policy adviser for U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham in Washington, D.C., said running with the bulls was a little scarier than working in politics. ‘Congressmen generally don’t charge, and their horns aren’t as sharp,’ he said.”

Indeed, Congress seem all but hornless these days, even as Bush’s popularity reaches record lows and Republicans look to the approaching shadow of an Obama presidency the same way the Orcs looked to the return of the wizard. The real news here, of course, is that even after the president signed an executive order directing the EPA to “take the first steps toward regulations” to reduce the nation’s gas usage by 20 percent over the next decade, he had low-level trolls working behind closed doors to thwart that directive. This troll just happened to have a funnier name than most.