Judge Overturns Obama Power Grab in Gulf…For Now

A federal judge has, for the moment, spared already-suffering Gulf state residents from the brunt of President Obama’s most recent anti-energy Power Grab. It has enjoined the administration from implementing its moratorium on deepwater drilling. The Order is here, and the Opinion here.

The administration has vowed to appeal. Regardless of the outcome, this victory is temporary. As I detail in Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America, Obama and his administration are committed to strangling domestic energy production. At the same time they promise to also clamp down on the cost of consumption, all in a way that makes our last energy-poverty president, Jimmy Carter, appear a free-market pioneer.

This was telegraphed immediately after Obama’s inauguration by his by administration revoking massive tracts of public land from possible lease for domestic energy production, even to the point of suspending lease agreements already struck.

None of this is either accident or coincidence, but affirmed as a deliberate plan by Obama’s concurrent clamp-down on families’ access to energy with a cap-and-trade scheme he vowed would cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket”. Though he dared not speak the scheme’s name, Obama renewed his support for it in his Oval Office speech last Tuesday by praising the House-passed bill.

Then, he also restated his threat of imposing central planning in the guise of the state engineering a “green economy”. Although last week he also suddenly dropped reference to his specific European models — because those countries like Spain have now admitted the devastation they caused, after his praise brought scrutiny — we know that even Europe has refused to ban production of domestic energy resources.

From the moratorium blocked by a federal judge today, pending appeal by Obama, to the planned “lame-duck” Congress-wide passage of the “cap-and-trade” energy tax, Obama is affirming all that he telegraphed and which is laid out in detail in Power Grab.