Some GOP Using Offshore Drilling Against Obama
Sensing an opportunity arising from anger about the offshore drilling oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Republican Party in Congress is starting to shift its ideology to suit the times. In 2008, the GOP declared itself the party of drill baby drill, and just a couple months ago was complaining that Barack Obama wasn’t moving fast enough to allow additional offshore drilling for oil. Now, some congressional Republicans are beginning to complain that the Obama Administration has been hasty in its support of offshore drilling.
That argument was made last week by U.S. Representative John Mica, a Republican from Florida. Mica stood on the House floor and suggested that President Obama should have been allowed less offshore drilling over the last year and a half.
Comparing summaries of expansion of offshore drilling under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Mica explained, “It was mentioned that the Bush administration gave 4,200 leases… The Obama administration, coming into office, issued – these are deepwater, 1,000 feet to 8,000 feet – more than two dozen. We’ll also submit that to the Record.
Now, if they knew this was a management problem in the Minerals Management Service, and I just cited the Bush administration investigated that agency for 2 years and conducted a very thorough review of what was going on, they must have known there was a management problem when they inherited it.
Instead, what did they do? Faster than BP can pay their bill, they took the proposal from BP in deepwater, some of the deepest water drill – here are the number of ones that the committee found that there’s deepwater drilling in – and they carte blanche, rubber-stamped approval of this outline that BP gave them.”
Congressman Mica’s speech was a defensive maneuver, of course, intended to provide cover for Republicans who had pushed for a rush to drill practically everywhere up and down America’s coasts. Still, it was significant in that it implicitly accepted the idea that offshore drilling is risky, and should not be rushed into. If Republican politicians continue to shift their arguments in this direction, it may not be long before efforts to restore the moratorium on the expansion of offshore drilling have a reasonable chance of success.
