Americans’ hopes for a permanent end to BP’s runaway oil spill soared last week when the company finally started pumping cement down the well bore. But then we also learned that Transocean, the world’s largest offshore drilling company, is operating 14 other wells in the Gulf of Mexico – and 139 worldwide – with possibly the same hazardous operational problems and reckless supervisory culture that it allowed at the Deepwater Horizon before that now-infamous drilling rig exploded in fire and sank, killing 11 workers and unleashing the 200 million-gallon-catastrophe in the Gulf.
The ominous ironies do not end there. Sandwiched between the hope for the top-kill of the oil-spill well, and the news of Transocean’s similarly hazardous operations at other wells, was the spectacle of the Senate Republicans’ lethal filibuster of a Democratic bill to revamp and tighten oversight of offshore drilling operations. The bill would have overhauled and substantially improved safety, oversight, accountability and financial liability requirements.
That Republicans would leave Washington for the August recess with the nation’s most disastrous spill in history in their wake without broadly tightening drilling rules is mind-boggling. With such fresh evidence of disaster all around the Gulf, Americans must wonder why the GOP would roll over for the oil industry’s massive lobbying effort to kill the bill for saner drilling regulation – if not to preserve the oil industry’s huge campaign contributions.
The oil spill may be at an end, but the massive damage to fisheries, oiled beaches, marshes and the Gulf states’ economies has not begun to be remedied. The residue of the spill and its collateral damages have upended families, businesses, communities, residents’ way of life and their economies across a broad swathe of the Gulf states. The victims merit redress from Congress, and a more secure future.
Americans more broadly deserve an answer from the GOP, the Party of No, as to why Republican senators are willing to block a bill to fix the problems that caused this massive damage, and then just walk away.
Voters in Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama, in fact, would do well to ask their senators during the recess how they can let their consciences rest when they are so opposed, strictly for partisan political reasons, to a remedy for the problems that plague drilling operations. Such blind, partisan opposition – like their votes against financial reform to inhibit another disastrous financial implosion like that which occurred two years ago – is negligent beyond reason.
Both chambers’ bills would revamp the Interior Department agency that was long notorious for giving offshore drillers free rein, corruptly cozying up to them, winking at their transgressions and rubber-stamping approval of faulty operations and safety plans. Both bills would condition drilling permits on realistic emergency response plans, standardized safe-operations procedures and certification of blow-out preventers. They also expand the drilling industry’s liability fund, and would eliminate the miserably low $75 million liability cap for spill damages. Given BP’s $20 billion down payment for damages, the notion of such a relatively modest liability cap is ludicrous.
The bill passed by the House would close hidden and indefensible loopholes that notoriously allowed oil and gas drillers to evade $53 billion in federal royalties for extraction of publicly owned energy resources from the Gulf. This enormously important issue ought to be adequately covered in the Senate bill, if it can be resurrected. Indeed, it is fair to suspect that the oil industry lobbyists’ bull-rush against the bill in the Senate hinges mainly on the possible loss of this corporate welfare mega-favor.
The bill before the Senate, previously a part of broader energy legislation, is now narrowly tailored to address specifically the systemic problems that yet plague offshore oil drilling. If Senate Republicans can’t bring themselves to set partisanship aside in the interest of broad public safety, a healthy environment and a stronger, more self-reliant energy economy, what, indeed, do GOP senators stand for? Americans need to know the answer to that question before the November elections.