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Louisiana's under siege
It was wonderful news for Louisiana when a New Orleans federal judge ruled Tuesday that a moratorium on deepwater oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico be lifted immediately.
We're afraid happy times will be short-lived, though.
Less than a few hours after U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman ruled that the Interior Department acted arbitrarily when it ordered a halt to deepwater drilling in the Gulf, the Obama administration declared it would appeal the judge's ruling. Furthermore, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that his department would write a new moratorium order to comply with concerns Feldman raised in his ruling.
To surmise, the Obama administration has declared war on Louisiana and her people.
How else could the Obama administration explain its hard-line stand against an industry that plays an extraordinarily vital role in Louisiana's economic well-being?
President Obama first ordered a halt to deepwater drilling on May 6. He ordered it in the wake of the April 21 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion some 40-50 miles off Louisiana's coast. Obama said the moratorium would be effective through the month of May. On May 27, Obama extended the moratorium for six months, ignoring the fact that the moratorium would put thousands of people out of work and rip Louisiana's treasury apart in light of a loss in tax revenues generated by the oil and gas industry.
In ordering the moratorium, Obama reasoned that the government needed to conduct an investigation to ensure oil companies acted properly in drilling for oil in the Gulf. That's understandable.
The government and experts in the field could conduct a fairly quick investigation of the oil industry and order changes in the manner in which the industry explores and drills for oil off our nation's coast. They could conduct the investigation quickly and safely if they desired to do it. After all, no one wants to relive the chain of events that have evolved since the Deepwater incident in April, events that cost 11 men their lives while oil continues to spew uncontrollably from a hole in the floor of the Gulf.
For Obama, though, to order all hands on deck, so to speak, to carry out a directive that would clearly cause harm to an industry and the thousands of people who work in and with it told us the president is making decisions based on pure politics, rather than employing a rational thought process. The word madman comes to mind. Fool does too.
For now, we are forced to sit idly by and wait for the courts to tell us whether the moratorium will stand. In other words, we must wait and see what the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals says about Feldman's ruling. Ultimately, we could find ourselves awaiting word from the U.S. Supreme Court since it is more than obvious Obama will not rest until he does anything and everything in his power to shut down the oil industry's pursuit of oil in the Gulf and beyond.
Our backs are against a wall thanks to a president who clearly does not have our best interests at heart. |
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