The White House move could create a roadblock to one of President-elect Trump’s major plans.
Summary
President Joe Biden invoked the 1953 Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect 625 million acres of U.S. offshore waters from future oil and gas drilling, blocking areas along the East and West coasts, Eastern Gulf of Mexico, and Alaska's North Bering Sea.
The move aims to prevent environmental damage and hinder Donald Trump’s plans to expand fossil fuel production upon returning to office.
Trump allies and the oil industry criticized the decision as politically motivated, while Biden emphasized bipartisan support for protecting coastal regions.
Anything Biden can do with the stroke of a pen, Trump can undo, right? I'm all for it, but I really don't feel like things are as protected as these articles imply.
This particular law allows the president to designate protected areas, but doesn't give them the authority to remove that designation. Trump would need either an act of Congress or the Supreme Court to take down the law as unconstitutional.
Depends. If there's no preexisting law then yes, he can just cancel orders. But presidents aren't supposed to be able to override the law.
If there's a law and it has administrative requirements for revoking a particular status, then one president can order the agency administering it to consider putting something under that status, and the next one has to follow that same laws requirements on how to end that status - and it might not have a provision that next president can put to use.
Like, his aides have said, Chris Clizza even admitted it.
He shuffles around and his aides handle everything.
We could tell the last few years, but it's been a couple weeks now since people in his admin/party started admitting it. So it's weird to still see headlines pretending like Biden is actually doing anything besides his best Ronald Reagan impression.
Were they just planning to win? Feels like he did nothing for 4 years and just in these last 3 months he's actually trying to push through policy changes.
I think they were planning to win with Republican support.
Biden did a good amount of work, but wasn't the best at advertising it. He was always sort of center right, but Republicans really are his lunch the few times he did speak up about anything progressive he was trying.
We've been on a mad dash to the right ever since Reagan. Any attempt at stopping that momentum is going to look a little pale in comparison.
It's only politically motivated when you use political affiliation to respond to it. "Leave it in the fucking ground already" is a scientific standpoint, not a political one. Fuck these goons.
Not only that, but I saw an article that Biden also, nearly in the same breath, approved a whole bunch of new offshore drilling elsewhere. So it's not even that we're not doing new drilling, we're just not doing as much as we possibly could.