Freedom Line Blog

In a surprise announcement on the Senate floor this afternoon, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that he will be supporting a moratorium on earmarks in the 112th Congress.  McConnell, who for the last couple of weeks has defended the practice of earmarks, stated:

…I have thought about these things long and hard over the past few weeks. I’ve talked with my members. I’ve listened to them. Above all, I have listened to my constituents.  And what I’ve concluded is that on the issue of congressional earmarks, as the leader of my party in the Senate, I have to lead first by example. Nearly every day that the Senate’s been in session for the past two years, I have come down to this spot and said that Democrats are ignoring the wishes of the American people. When it comes to earmarks, I won’t be guilty of the same thing.

Make no mistake. I know the good that has come from the projects I have helped support throughout my state. I don’t apologize for them. But there is simply no doubt that the abuse of this practice has caused Americans to view it as a symbol of the waste and the out-of-control spending that every Republican in Washington is determined to fight. And unless people like me show the American people that we’re willing to follow through on small or even symbolic things, we risk losing them on our broader efforts to cut spending and rein in government.

That’s why today I am announcing that I will join the Republican Leadership in the House in support of a moratorium on earmarks in the 112th Congress. …

Read McConnell’s full statement here.

William F. Buckley, Jr. famously said that he’d rather be governed by the first 400 names in the Boston phonebook than by the Harvard faculty.

Every so often, however, the phone book and the faculty actually agree.  According to a new Bloomberg poll, a remarkable 73% of respondents oppose our supposed philosopher-king Barack Obama’s drilling moratorium.  What makes this remarkable is that approximately three-quarters of the American public, which very rarely seems to find consensus on anything these days, just doesn’t buy Obama’s constant drumbeat of scapegoating the oil industry, “deregulation” or the previous administration.  What makes this even more remarkable, however, is that Obama’s own appointed “experts” agree with everyday citizens.  As noted in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, the hyper-partisan investigatory panel selected by Obama himself expresses skepticism toward his moratorium.

Add the fact that two separate courts have rejected the Obama Administration’s ill-advised moratorium, which is jeopardizing even more jobs in that hard-hit region, and we’re approaching unanimity against the self-professed “bridge-builder” Obama.

In response to the uncertainty created by the Obama Administration’s foolish drilling moratorium, which has now been overturned by two separate courts, Diamond Offshore Drilling, Inc. announced that it will shift its Ocean Endeavor operation to Egypt.  As The Wall Street Journal noted, “when it comes to a showdown between jobs and ideology, the Obama Administration never fails to choose the latter.”

The Ocean Endeavor contract was worth $100 million, and its loss will cost “a great deal” of American jobs.  Even Democrat Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana found herself forced to break with the Obama Administration, noting that the offshore drilling industry safely operates approximately 42,000 other wells and employs innumerable Gulf citizens both directly and indirectly.  Sadly, Obama once again seems to be stimulating the far-left activist community, but not the American economy or job climate.

See if you can make sense of the following two paragraphs:

Tens of thousands of gallons more oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday after an undersea robot bumped a venting system, forcing BP to remove the cap that had been containing some of the crude.

The setback, yet another in the nine-week effort to stop the gusher, came as thick pools of oil washed up on Pensacola Beach in Florida and the Obama administration tried to figure out how to resurrect a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. (Emphasis mine)

Why on this great blue marble of ours is the Obama Administration trying to force the shut-down of nearly three dozen properly working oil rigs when there are now tens of thousands more gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf from a totally different site?

Maybe it’s debatable whether a moratorium should be sought.  But how can it be that this seems to be the only solution the White House is willing to fight for when it could be doing a lot more good getting the federal bureaucracy to start helping state and local governments clean up the mess right now?  Is the Office of the President of the United States really this impotent?