Another day, another radical Obama judge legislating from the bench.
U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason tossed out Trump’s executive order that overturned Obama’s offshore drilling bans in the Arctic Ocean and many canyons in Atlantic Ocean.
In a court ruling late Friday, Gleason, an Obama appointee, said Presidents have the power under federal law to remove certain lands from development but cannot revoke those removals, the Washington Times reported.
In other words, Obama can pass an executive order banning offshore drilling, but President Trump’s reversal of Obama’s EO is not allowed and only Congress can reverse the order.
Via The Washington Times:
“The wording of President Obama’s 2015 and 2016 withdrawals indicates that he intended them to extend indefinitely, and therefore be revocable only by an act of Congress,” said Gleason, who was nominated to the bench by Obama
The American Petroleum Institute, a defendant in the case, disagreed with the ruling.
“In addition to bringing supplies of affordable energy to consumers for decades to come, developing our abundant offshore resources can provide billions in government revenue, create thousands of jobs and will also strengthen our national security,” it said in a statement.
Erik Grafe, an attorney with Earthjustice, welcomed the ruling, saying it “shows that the president cannot just trample on the Constitution to do the bidding of his cronies in the fossil fuel industry at the expense of our oceans, wildlife andclimate.”
Earthjustice represented numerous environmental groups that sued the Trump administration over the April 2017 executive order reversing the drilling bans. At issue in the case was the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act.
Acting Assistant U.S. Attorney General Jeffrey Wood said during a hearing before Gleason in November that environmental groups were misinterpreting the intent of the law written in 1953. He said it is meant to be flexible and sensible and not intended to bind one president with decisions made by another when determining offshore stewardship as needs and realities change over time.
In 2015, Obama halted drilling and exploration in nearly 6,000 square miles of canyons in the Atlantic Ocean with the intention of ‘saving marine mammals and corals.’
In 2015 and 2016, Obama banned drilling and exploration of the Beaufort and Chukchi seas and the Hanna Shoal in the Arctic to ‘protect the polar bears and walruses.’
Now his radical judges are saving his ‘environmental legacy.’
Last week, radical Obama-appointed US District Judge Rudolph Contreras blocked oil and gas drilling across almost 500 square miles in Wyoming.
Judge Contreras said the oil drilling projects must take global warming junk science into account.
