The Obama Administration power grab continues. This time the president wants to seize more executive control over a massive piece of real estate: our oceans, the tributaries that lead to them, and the inland areas that surround those waterways.
Plenty of regulations, on the federal, state, and local levels, already govern the supervision of our oceans and coastlines. An estimated 140 laws are on the books for managing fisheries, offshore energy development, and marine conservation.Instead of cutting out the overlap and redundancy, and lessening the heavy burden of government rules, the Obama Administration is following a course that will create broad new regulations and expand Executive Branch overreach.
Just months after President Obama took office he formed a panel of federal bureaucrats and told them to create a “national policy” that would oversee oceans, coastlines, and the Great Lakes. Then, by executive order, the president launched a National Ocean Council which led to nine smaller panels. As the layers of federal bureaucracy pile up, so have the guarantees that the outcome – the president’s National Ocean Policy – will be another top-down, centralized plan that tramples the power of states and the rights of individual citizens.
Read more.