The strongly-worded 22-page order by U.S. District Court Judge
administration’s response to BP’s ongoing oil leak in the Gulf. A White
House spokesman said the administration would file an immediate appeal.
The ruling comes at a bad time for the president.
Little is going his way. The oil is still leaking, the economy is still
bad and to top it off, Obama may be on the brink of firing Gen.
Worse, the court’s ruling undermined one of the main
claims of the Obama administration: that it is thoughtful and
deliberate in all things. “The plaintiffs have established a likelihood
of successfully showing that the Administration acted arbitrarily and
capriciously in issuing the moratorium,” the judge wrote.
In announcing the appeal, White House spokesman
and the Department of Justice argued yesterday, that continuing to
drill at these depths without knowing what happened … potentially
puts the safety of those on the rigs and safety of the environment in
the Gulf at a danger that the president does not believe we can afford
right now.”
Mixed reaction from within the president’s own party
also underscored the challenge facing Obama as he tries to revamp
national energy policy in response to the spill. The ruling came a day
before the president is scheduled to meet with lawmakers on energy
policy.
Sen.
said she would urge the administration not to appeal the ruling but to
find a way to achieve its goal of ensuring safety without harming her
state’s fragile economy.
Another
said the ruling was “encouraging” for Louisianans whose jobs depend on
the oil and gas industry and expressed hope Obama wouldn’t fight it.
“As long as the administration is appealing the
decision, the future of energy production in the Gulf remains unclear,”
he said. “I hope the president will stand with the thousands of
families who have spoken loudly with one voice about the dangers this
moratorium poses to our economy and order his administration not to
appeal today’s decision.”
But Sen.
added: “We shouldn’t even consider putting our environment, our
economy, or our workers at risk on deepwater drilling projects until we
know what caused this tragedy in the
A vigorous challenge of the ruling may cheer envrionmentalists, but it puts Obama on one side of what
a former Democratic Senate aide working with a pro-environment
coalition, describes as “a division between folks who stand with Big
Oil and folks who don’t.” That could create political problems for a
president who has tried to straddle that divide, and who is hounded by
criticism that he has been unresponsive to the nationwide unemployment
crisis.
While not faulting Obama, some environmentalists
fretted Tuesday over the perception of presidential impotence in the
face of tragedy.
“What does it say about our system that even the president of
The decision was cheered by oil industry and the workers whose paychecks depend on the deep-water rigs.
“It’s a good thing they stopped that, because we were going to lose a lot of jobs,” said
owner of a small fleet of oil-industry crew boats. “The majority of
your big oil companies would leave … and we would all suffer.”
In coastal
budget cut as a result of lost tax revenue generated by the oil and gas
industry.
“The whole community breathed a sigh of relief,” he said.
Feldman’s order granted a preliminary injunction to
the plaintiffs in the case, a group of oil services support companies
headed by
Neither Justice Department nor Minerals Management
Services officials returned calls inquiring about the ruling’s
immediate effect on Gulf drilling. But
senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, believed it
meant that drilling could resume immediately — although she said that
as a practical matter, companies might hold off until there was some
clarity about the appeals process.
Wannamaker, who argued before the court on behalf of
intervening environmental groups, said it was likely that the
defendants could seek a stay from Judge Feldman, which could continue
the drilling ban until the case is resolved by the 5th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals.
The uncertainty of the legal process could cause hesitation among oil companies in the Gulf, some analysts said.
“If you have the plans in place and the crews ready,
it would not be that difficult to start up, but since there will be an
appeal, I’m not so sure they would want to face the possibility of
having to shut down again quickly if the appeal succeeds,” said
In the order, Feldman called the Deepwater Horizon
spill “an unprecedented, sad, ugly and inhuman disaster.” But he took
the government to task for overreaching in its
moratorium, which suspended all current or pending deep-water drilling
operations in the Gulf, putting 33 rigs temporarily out of service.
That “blanket moratorium, with no parameters,”
Feldman wrote, “seems to assume that because one rig failed and
although no one yet fully knows why, all companies and rigs drilling
new wells over 500 feet also universally present an imminent danger.”
Elsewhere, he wrote: “If some drilling equipment
parts are flawed, is it rational to say all are? Are all airplanes a
danger because one was? All oil tankers like Exxon Valdez? All trains?
All mines? That sort of thinking seems heavy-handed, and rather
overbearing.”
Feldman agreed that the plaintiffs would suffer
“irreparable harm” from the moratorium, noting that the movement of the
big rigs to other points around the globe “would clearly ripple
throughout the economy in this region.”
He also blasted the government for asserting, in a
post-explosion report on Gulf drilling policy that Obama had
commissioned, that the call for a moratorium had been peer-reviewed by
seven expert engineers. Feldman noted that five of those experts agreed
only with a “much more limited kind of moratorium.” In the restrained
language of the court, Feldman suggested the government was playing
dirty, writing that its handling of the issue “might cause some
apprehension about the probity of the process.”
Questions also arose Tuesday about Feldman and his
previous ties to oil and gas companies that may be affected by his
ruling. A financial disclosure report for 2008 showed that he held
investments in
“Every day (
isn’t getting its daily rental fees their profits go down, and every
day their profits go down is bad for their shareholders,” Gordon said.
Feldman, she said, “has got a clear conflict.”
But other ethics watchdogs, including
president of Judicial Watch, said that little could be made of the
document — the latest to be released by the federal courts — because it
was not clear if Feldman was still invested in the companies.
Judge Feldman did not return a call for comment Tuesday.
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