Subpoena Approved For Obama Over Gulf Moratorium Report

Earlier today, the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee gave Chairman Rep. Richard “Doc” Hasting authority to issue a subpoena to the Obama Administration for documents relating the offshore oil and natural gas drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

For more than a year now, the committee has been investigating why the Department of the Interior issued a report implying that the National Academy of Engineers endorsed shutting down energy production two years ago in the Gulf for six months.

Academy of Engineers officials didn’t think the move was a good idea—going to far as to say at time that the moratorium would be tantamount to “punishing the innocent.”

Rep. Jeff Landry issued the committee’s opening statement, in which he called for the subpoena and spoke about the economic impact that halting drilling in the Gulf had and how the administration’s “de facto moratorium” through the permitting process is still costing American jobs:

Rep. John Fleming, who also sits on the House Natural Resources Committee, issued a statement of his own in support of the subpoena:

“The Obama Administration’s Department of the Interior (DOI) has been stonewalling Congress on this matter for nearly a year. In 2010 the department falsely claimed that a panel of engineers gave its stamp of approval to a drilling moratorium that cost jobs, devastated the Gulf economy, and created a lasting impact on our nation’s energy supply. Days later, those engineers revealed that the department inserted the moratoriumrecommendation after they had completed their review. The engineers said they ‘never agreed’ to it and, in fact, said the moratorium would be an act of ‘punishing the innocent.’

“Since April 2011 our committee has been trying to investigate the White House editing of this federal report which led to the shutting down of oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. Our document requests have gone largely unanswered, while the executive branch has played bureaucratic games to avoid its responsibility. The department even blocked its own Inspector General from turning over necessary documents.

“The DOI’s lack of transparency has been stunning and obstructionary. Jobs were lost and our domestic energy supply cut. That’s why there must be subpoenas. It’s time the administration answer to the people on this matter.”

For those who are still generous enough to the president to explain away his unnecessary shutting down of energy production in the Gulf as simply a stupid knee-jerk reaction to a crisis should be reminded what his former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel once said:

Of course, Emanuel was talking about the financial crisis back in 2008, not the BP oil spill—but you should NEVER want a serious crisis to go to waste. Why would you when you are handed a beauty like thousands of barrels of crude pouring daily into the Gulf?

Couple the Emanuel clip with this one of Obama and you start to get a more complete picture:

So we know that the president didn’t really give a damn about consumers paying more for energy if he could stick it to producers through a cap-and trade initiative to appease environmentalists that helped bring him to office. Why wouldn’t he use the BP crisis as an opportunity to shut down production? He’s a hardcore ideologue that believes the man-made global warming tripe, himself, after all.

Unemployment has averaged over nine percent nationally during Obama’s first term and gas threatens to rise above the $4 mark this summer.

I suspect that the reason that a subpoena is needed to get to the truth of why the president pulled the plug on Gulf oil and gas production is because it would reveal that rising energy prices and lost jobs are just collateral damage for what he sees as a greater good—making he world safe from fossil fuels and evil corporations.

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