President Obama is fighting more than just one state in court. With Louisiana facing an economic catastrophe because of the Obama administration’s moratorium on deep-water drilling, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar and the Obama Administration have asked a federal court to reinstate his moratorium on deep-water drilling, the New York Times reports.
Salazar argues that the moratorium never should have been lifted because “Deepwater Horizon accident’s catastrophic impacts justify Interior’s response because the harm from a potential second incident is inestimable (particularly where most cleanup resources are already devoted to the current spill).”
Judge Martin L. C. Feldman of the United States District Court in New Orleans issued a preliminary injunction against the ban on June 22d, noting that “After reviewing the Secretary’s Report, the Moratorium Memorandum, and the Notice to Lessees, the Court is unable to divine or fathom a relationship between the findings and the immense scope of the moratorium.”
Elected officials throughout the Gulf coast have been critical of the moratorium from the first, especially after Salazar apologized for “misrepresenting” the opinion of the experts who supposedly recommended the drilling ban.
Sen. David Vitter, R-La., had this to say about the administration’s latest attempt to institute the moratorium:
