It’s not even day one of Obama’s presidency but the promised actions of our future Marxist in Chief will spell disaster for this country.
Investor’s Business Daily | Nov. 10, 2008
President-elect Obama isn’t planning to wait for Congress to pass his agenda. On Day One, he plans to rescind Bush executive orders on everything from embryonic stem cell research to offshore drilling.
When minority Republicans seemed to force congressional Democrats to abandon efforts to extend the legislative ban on offshore drilling that expired on Oct. 1, it was considered a pro-drilling victory. In July, President Bush had lifted an 18-year presidential ban on offshore oil drilling. Soon, it was hoped, it would be drill, baby, drill.
The Democrats knew otherwise. They’d run out the clock knowing that a President Obama and a re-elected Democratic Congress would undo this right-wing mischief. As Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., noted at a Sept. 18 press conference: “Nobody’s going to be drilling offshore in the next three months.”
Judging by statements made by John Podesta, nobody’s going to be drilling anywhere domestically for a very long time. On “Fox News Sunday,” Obama’s transition chief called the federal Bureau of Land Management’s plan to open about 360,000 acres of public land in Utah to oil and gas drilling “a mistake.”
“They want to have oil and gas drilling in some of the most sensitive, fragile lands in Utah,” Podesta said. Expect Obama to rescind that action and reissue the executive order banning offshore drilling in protected waters.
The Washington Post reports that the Obama transition team has a list of 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders scheduled to be undone with a stroke of Obama’s pen on alleged climate change, embryonic stem cell research and other issues.
Expect President Obama to issue an executive order declaring CO2, the basis for all life on earth, a pollutant, and directing the Environmental Protection Agency to formally regulate emissions from your SUV down to your lawn mower. He “would initiate those rule makings,” Obama’s energy adviser, Jason Grumet, said in an Oct. 6 interview in Boston.
Obama has said he’d sign a presidential waiver that Bush refused to sign letting California regulate carbon dioxide emissions from cars. California sought to mandate that cars achieve a fuel economy average of 36 miles per gallon in eight years and that emissions be cut by 30% between 2009 and 2016.
The auto industry may need an even bigger bailout than Democrats plan.
Aside from job- and growth-killing environmental executive orders guaranteed to bankrupt the coal industry, cause domestic energy production to shrivel away and, as he promised during the campaign, electricity and fuel prices to “skyrocket,” Obama plans to venture into social issues and remove restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research (ESCR).
Bush, the first president to spend any federal dollars on ESCR, in August 2001 limited federal funding to existing stem cell lines. He said no federal dollars could fund research into embryos newly created for destruction.
Private research was never restricted in any way, and we have argued that if ESCR was as promising as proponents claimed, investors would be lining up in droves. Adult stem cell research has resulted in actual treatments and therapies as well as astounding discoveries. Obama will open the federal spigots for ESCR, reviving the moral controversy in a tight economy.
“There’s a lot that the president can do using his executive authority without waiting for congressional action, and I think we’ll see the president do that,” Podesta said. That he can, and has won the right to do. But is it change we need? We have our doubts.
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