Thursday, June 24, 2010

Obama's Bill of Attainder

By Douglas V. Gibbs

If the oil well in the gulf is not successfully capped it could continue to spew oil for decades. This little tidbit of information was no doubt provided by the alarmists that want oil drilling stopped, and wish to accomplish that by filling the people with the fear of disaster. These are also the folks that state we are in danger of running out of oil, and because of peak oil we must move towards safer, greener energy alternatives.

If our oil is limited, then why would a single well spew for decades?

Cap and Trade, the argument using peak oil as the catalyst of the fear-mongering, and the Obama handling of British Petroleum (the company believed to be responsible for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico) has power-grab written all over it.

The 2010 BP Oil Spill is not the first oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and it will not be the last. In 1979, Ixtoc 1 owned by Mexico's Pemex oil company also blew its top, and it took nine months before the leak was contained. In only 200 feet of water they tried all of the same techniques to contain the gusher, and like now, the methods failed (apparently nobody has learned from history). Now, however, it is even more disconcerting because rather than a couple hundred feet down, the well is 5,000 feet down. Rather than work with BP and find new alternative methods to fix the problem, however, our President has decided to point fingers, threaten, and "motivate" BP to create a $20 billion fund as punishment for their "irresponsible" actions.

The King of England used to do that kind of stuff just prior to the American Revolution. The injustice of the British Government to declare persons or groups guilty of some crime, and then punish them without the benefit of due process angered the Americans, and motivated them to place attainder laws on the books when the nation was born. In fact, the prohibition of bills of attainder appears three times in the U.S. Constitution.

The President of the United States, in his treatment of BP, has acted as a legislature, and the judiciary, and frankly, he does not have that kind of authority.

As I have said before, I am sure that BP was not an angel when it came to the oil spill, and there is also plenty of blame left over for the environmentalists and government for setting up regulations disallowing oil companies from drilling in shallower areas, or on land in, say, Montana, the Dakotas, or Alaska. But if there is guilt, and if BP is in fact a guilty party, it is not the President of the United States' authority to inflict punishment for that guilt - guilt must be determined in a court of law, and the punishment will then be applied.

Obama's actions of inflicting punishment without a judicial trial is both unconstitutional, and an unbelievable overreach of power.

Acts of attainder, no matter what their form, is prohibited, and to act as the President has is downright criminal.

But, then again, what did we expect from a Marxist student of Saul Alinsky?

-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary

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