PrintMay 28, 2010
Obama's Environmental Policy: Blame the Law, Then 'Bust Through' It
President Obama was generous in spreading blame during his press conference yesterday addressing his administration's slow and incompetent response to the BP oil spill. He even blamed the law his administration is charged with enforcing.
He noted:
Under current law, the Interior Department has only 30 days to review an exploration plan submitted by an oil company. That leaves no time for the appropriate environmental review. The result is, they're continually waived.* * *Congress mandated that only 30 days could be allocated before a yes-or-no answer was given. That was by law. . . . So [the Interior Department's Minerals Management Service] hands were tied.* * *And as a consequence, what became the habit predating my administration was, you just automatically gave the environmental waiver because you couldn't complete an environmental study in 30 days.
So the law, it seems, created bad habits. That's a revealing take from the former big-government legislator now big-government executive charged with enforcing the law.
What's even more interesting is how he evaluates what he should have done, which is a good indication of how Obama views the law: "Some of it was constraints of the law, as I just mentioned. But we should have busted through those constraints."
Given another brewing scandal about whether Congressman Joe Sestak was offered a job in the administration if he agreed to drop out of the Senate primary in Pennsylvania, which is alleged to be an unlawful act, I'm not sure the President's lawyers were pleased he went on record about his willingness to "bust through" laws.
