Some time ago the Magna Carta was signed. I think most people in America thinks it was a good thing. It's actually not the first document that formally placed the law above the reigning monarch of the British Empire, but it was the first to really be enforced. And I think there's reason to think that this idea, formalized in the Magna Carta, was perhaps the greatest idea of the modern world. There are scientific ideas that you'd have to place beside it, but as a political ideal, this might be #1.
So that having been said, I was listening to a Sunday Morning Talking Head Show from a few weeks back. On it, Obama's chief environmental adviser (I'd say it was Jackson of the EPA, but I'm not sure it was her, but it was certainly a spokesperson of the administration) said, of BP and the $75M current cap on damages for energy companies, that "BP will pay the full amount, regardless of what current laws say." I may be off on the exact quote, but it's pretty close.
Now I know that should congress pass a law that retroactively removes this cap for BP that it probably doesn't set a precedent, but I can't stop thinking about what the bold, unembarrassed statement from the administration really means, when you translate it into English:
"We are no longer, " said the Obama Administration, "a nation of laws."
1 comment:
I think it's a mistake to read too much into a broad statement which was intended to express a sense of determination that retribution will be exacted from BP. Obama said nothing about process, and since this was a public political statement he didn't dwell on the inconvenient fact of the existing law.
Seriously, I can think of three "lawful" ways for costs to be recouped in excess of the cap:
1. Negotiated agreement in which BP agrees to a sum to be set into an escrow account from which clean-up and compensation costs will be allocated.
2. Judicial: get a judge to determine whether the law restricting liability to $75M is valid and what is covered by that (from what I understand, it applies only to liability from lost income and the like, not clean-up costs)
3. Change the law. Efforts to do just that are already fairly far along in both houses on Congress.
Option 3 seems the simplest and best approach, and the most likely.
But I don't see much to get bent out of shape about when a President expresses an intent to seek justice. It's not the most nuanced public statement, but nuance doesn't play well in Peoria, ya know?
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