President Barack Obama's plan to force BP to set up an account to
pay for cleanup and compensation related to the oil spill won some GOP
support Monday.
Sen. George LeMieux, a Florida Republican
whose state is among those bearing the brunt of the impact from the
Gulf of Mexico oil spill, said he was "encouraged" by news that the
administration would force BP to put money in escrow to fund recovery
efforts.
Encouraged
Pres. Obama is moving toward idea Cong. Jeff Miller and I put forward a
month ago requiring BP to set up a fund for cleanup.
Obama
is expected to formally announce the escrow account Tuesday night in
an address from the Oval Office, following a two-day trip to survey the
impact of the spill in Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The president
has previously surveyed the effects of the spill in Louisiana.
A liberal action group is spending big this week against three Republican senators over their vote seeking to cancel Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation of greenhouse gases.
The group Americans United for Change (AUFC) is spending over $400,000 on television ads in the home states of Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.), hammering them for joining with fellow Republicans to support a resolution of disapproval last week seeking to nix new EPA rules.
The ads are "hitting these senators hard on the nose for this vote in an effort to make it as politically toxic as possible for them back home to continue standing with Big Oil," said a spokesman for the group.
The three Republicans — Burr and Grassley face reelection battles this year, while Brown will almost surely face a tough challenge in 2012 — joined all other GOP senators and six Democratsin a failed procedural vote seeking to cancel EPA rules reining in emissions contributing to global warming.
AUFC will spend $118,000 to run an ad against Grassley in Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, and $234,000 to run an ad against Burr in Raleigh and Charlotte. Those spots will run June 15-21. The group also already spent $53,000 to run its ad against Brown, a spot that aired during Sunday night's NBA finals game between the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics.
The ads are also part of a sustained campaign by the liberal group to pressure Republicans on their vote over the resolution, tying the GOP senators' vote to the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as to the progress of a potential energy and climate bill through Congress this year.
Their story also notes how unusual the plan is. “Legal experts struggled to come up with a precedent for such a move. Examples of government-run funds exist, but they differ from the proposal facing BP,” their piece states.
Freshman Texas Rep. Pete Olson plans to introduce a bill to lift the Obama administration's six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling, Texas TV station KPRC Local 2 reports.
Olson, a Republican, said the moratorium could cost the Gulf Coast upward of 100,000 jobs if its 33 rigs remain idle.
"What that's doing is turning this tragedy into an unmitigated disaster for our nation," Olson said. "We're going to lose thousands of jobs."
Separately, Rep. Charles Boustany Jr. (R-La.) wrote to President Barack Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Thursday to warn them that the moratorium could cause Louisiana to lose thousands of jobs. Boustany was one of 58 bipartisan House members who signed a letter urging the administration to lift the earlier ban on shallow-water operations.
"While recent decisions allow some shallow-water oil and gas production, the administration's
inconsistency furthers the uncertainty for thousands of Louisiana workers," Boustany wrote in an editorial published Sunday by the Daily Advertiser in Lafayette, La. "The knee-jerk reaction to stop all permitting demonstrates a lack of informed decision-making from the federal authorities."
Boustany adds that the moratorium threatens more than 26,000 jobs that normally exist aboard platforms, according to the Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil and Gas Association.
"Thousands of additional jobs servicing these rigs also hang in the balance," he writes, "including welders, suppliers, caterers and dockworkers."
Olson said he planned to introduce his bill lifting the moratorium early this coming week.
"We're going to be affected here in the greater Houston area," he said, "because this is where the manufacturing that supports those operations is."
The Obama administration announced the deepwater moratorium on May 14 in the wake of the April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon. Salazar testified before the Senate energy panel Wednesday that the moratorium is "not the stop button, it's the pause button" and that BP will have to pay the salaries of oil industry workers who lose their jobs because of ramifications from the oil spill.
Two GOP Gulf Coast governors on Sunday bashed media coverage of the BP oil spill, claiming that it’s driving tourists away from beaches that remain clean.
“It is very sensational, it is the worst pictures that you can get, and it shows every hour on cable news, and several times a day on the regular networks,” Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
He said the nonstop coverage is failing to show that the spill’s impact has varied depending on the area.
“People in the United States have the impression that the whole Gulf of Mexico is ankle-deep in oil, which is simply not the case,” he said, adding that oil has not reached his state’s coast, although it has made incursions into barrier islands.
The governors of two states threatened by the Gulf of Mexico oil spill offered starkly different views Sunday about whether the six-month federal ban on deepwater oil-and-gas drilling should be scrapped.
Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) – echoing Gulf Coast politicians including Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) and Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) – said the ban will harm the regional and national economy.
“I don’t think we should have a moratorium,” Barbour said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” He said it is important to discover what caused the massive BP oil spill, but defended the overall safety history of the offshore industry and insisted that “it is very reasonable to continue to drill.”
