Federal Judge Gives the Obama Admin. BAD News

Federal Judge Gives the Obama Admin. BAD News

There is nothing I like more than the taste of bacon and the smell of gunpowder. A close second, however, is watching President Obama get his butt handed to him by federal judges. Especially when it concerns such a high-profile issue as fracking.

Ahhhh, you hear that? That’s the sound of liberals everywhere crying. Sweet, sweet music.

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From The Federalist Papers:

A federal judge struck down Barack Obama’s new regulations on fracking, declaring the Bureau of Land Management doesn’t have the authority to impose rules on federal and Indian lands.

U.S. District Court Judge Scott Skavdahl said the Bureau of Land Management was never granted that regulatory power by Congress, instead lawmakers specifically chose to exclude fracking from regulatory oversight, NPR is reporting.

In the ruling, the judge made it clear specifically what he was considering in his ruling.

“The issue before this Court is not whether hydraulic fracturing is good or bad for the environment or the citizens of the United States,” he wrote. The question, instead, is “whether Congress has delegated to the Department of Interior legal authority to regulate hydraulic fracturing. It has not.”

The BLM rules in question include a requirement that companies drilling for oil and natural gas disclose the chemicals they use in the fracking process. They also mandate storage protocols for recovered wastewater, cement barriers between wells and water zones, and detailed disclosure of the locations of existing wells.

The rules were blocked by Judge Skavdahl last summer, NPR reports, and have been “stayed” since then.

They attempted to address a boon in the industry, but opponents, like the governors of four states where fracking is promising, Colorado, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming, were opposed to the rules, arguing the BLM overstepped its bounds.

The four states along with the Ute Indian tribe sued the Obama Administration.

And Skavdahl agreed that the BLM, a bureau of the Department of the Interior, had never been granted the authority to regulate fracking.

Try not to walk around with an ear-to-ear grin on your face for the rest of the day, I dare you.

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