Breaking: Court Ends Obama's Ban On "Deepwater Drilling"

After the BP oil spill had drug on for a while and PresBo was starting to experience some rather heavy political blow-back, he decided to issue a six month ban on all deep water drilling in the gulf. This decision was based upon the same mistaken supposition that makes people want to ground ALL planes of one type because one crashed. Do we recall all cars because one fails? Close all restaurants because one caused food poisoning? No.

But the ban slammed into place, and the economic pain began to be felt. PresBo made the ridiculous threat that BP should pay for lost wages because of the government's ban.

But some of the now-idled drilling companies filed an emergency court suit asking for a temporary injunction of the drilling ban... and today they won. The court issued a temporary restraining order against the federal government enforcing it's drilling ban. Not surprisingly, the administration slammed the ruling and announced its intention to immediately appeal the decision.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38855.html

The Obama administration plans to immediately appeal a New Orleans federal judge’s decision Tuesday to block President Barack Obama’s six-month moratorium on deepwater offshore drilling, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

"We will immediately appeal to the 5th Circuit,” Gibbs said. “The president strongly believes as the Department of Interior and the Department of Justice argued yesterday that continuing to drill at these depths without knowing what happened does not make any sense and puts the safety of those involved – potentially puts the safety of those on the rigs and safety of the environment in the Gulf at a danger that the president does not believe we cannot afford right now.”

If you're interested, as most of the news articles on this subject don't seem to be, since they don't contain the information, the court found that the decision to ban deep water drilling was "arbitrary and capricious" and imposed "irreparable harm" on the oil companies involved.

You can read the entire decision here:
http://www.laed.uscourts.gov/GENERAL/Notices/10-1663_doc67.pdf

This Court is persuaded that the public interest weighs in favor of granting a preliminary injunction. While a suspension of activities directed after a rational interpretation of the evidence could outweigh the impact on the plaintiffs and the public, here, the Court has found the plaintiffs would likely succeed in showing that the agency’s decision was arbitrary and capricious. An invalid agency decision to suspend drilling of wells in depths of over 500 feet simply cannot justify the immeasurable effect on the plaintiffs, the local economy, the Gulf region, and the critical present-day aspect of the availability of domestic energy in this country.

There's a lot of good reading in the decision, should you decide (as I did) to read the whole thing. And I urge you to READ the decision before criticizing it and calling it a bad one. The court decision made sense to me.