One big difficulty Republicans face in trying to undo the Dodd-Frank financial reform law is that, unlike the health-care law, it isn’t particularly controversial or unpopular. It came about because of a crisis that everyone felt acutely (and many are still suffering from). Also unlike health care, there hasn’t been a challenge to the law’s constitutionality, so getting rid of it entails more than filing a lawsuit and hoping the Supreme Court takes care of the rest. The presumptive GOP nominee, Mitt Romney, has pledged to overturn it. But he’s not exactly a pillar of constancy and resolve, and actually carrying through on the pledge would expose him and his party to a significant political risk.

And let’s be honest—the Wall Street firms most eager to undo the law rank among the least sympathetic interest groups in Washington. Most people not only don’t mind that these firms face tighter regulation, they actively favor it and think the government ought to rescind all those bonuses while they’re at it. This makes the GOP’s task of changing their mind a particularly onerous one.

What started as a rather arcane legal dispute between the Koch brothers and their longtime lieutenant, Cato president Ed Crane, quickly transformed into a PR-manufactured Washington melodrama: The famed and revered (in some quarters) Cato Institute has turned against its Dr. Frankenstein, Charles Koch, attacking its maker with the full range of PR-weaponry that has served Cato effectively over these past four decades. The same pundits who only yesterday fell over themselves defending the billionaire Koch brothers as principled libertarians now denounce their benefactors as venal Republican Party warmongers out to crush the Cato Institute’s “nonpartisan” “independent” “scholarship” for the crime of being, yes, principled libertarians. arguing, “Ultimately, Afghanistan becomes less important as a place to conduct military operations in the war on terrorism and more important as a place from which to launch military operations. And those operations should be