BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill killed 11 workers and gushed oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days (around 210 million gallons), the granddaddy of all marine oil spills. It may still be leaking. The oil ruined beaches in Louisiana and Florida, wrecked fishing industries and tourism, devastated wildlife populations and continues to cause serious illnesses among children along the coasts. The economic consequences were well over $100 billion. BP paid a big fine. Were there any consequences for the politicians who oversaw all this? Certainly not for Bobby Jindal, who went on to be elected governor of Louisiana. And, truth be told, not for any elected officials on any level. But when a Bernie supporter put out the chart below, mentioning how Hillary had been one of the senators to back off-shore drilling-- but not in her state, "not in the Finger Lakes" and "not off Long Island" she said on the floor of the Senate-- there were Hillary backers who challenged the assertion. Richard Champion, a scholar at the University of Iowa, looked into it for us.by Dr. Richard ChampionFrom PolitiFact: In 2006, [Bernie Sanders] was part of the House minority that voted against then-Louisiana Rep. Bobby Jindal’s Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act. Clinton supported that bill’s companion in the Senate, the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act (GOMESA) of 2006.Here's is Hillary Clinton's statement on her vote for the GOMESA bill: Long and short of it: "[W]e need to expand domestic oil and gas production."Now, it's pretty to difficult to sort through the byzantine oil leasing records. It would be nice to find a government list of leases opened up by the passage of the GOMESA bill, but it "seems" very likely that Lease Sale 206, from which the explosion of Deepwater Horizon came, was the result of GOMESA. Also, you have this Mother Jones article (they're usually pretty good) that sets the timeline:
The Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act, which was signed by George W. Bush that December, gave states a cut of offshore oil royalties in exchange for opening up 8.3 million acres of the western Gulf to drilling, including 5.8 million acres that had previously been set off-limits by Congress....In March 2008, Bush's interior secretary, Dirk Kempthorne, announced the first sale of an oil lease under the new law. On the block that day was also Lease Sale 206, the parcel that BP snatched up and later converted into a fountain of oily havoc.
Now to be fair to Clinton, the "nice" thing about GOMESA was that it resulted in much more revenue sharing between the oil companies and the surrounding states in exchange for opening up large sections of the Gulf for drilling. Mary Landrieu, in her failed reelection bid last year, often touted her work for the passage of GOMESA.To make this relevant to the current presidential race, is fits well with Bernie Sanders' "new" pitch that he has been right all along (for decades, really) while Hillary made politically expedient votes, possibly angling for campaign donors, only to flip to oppose all this drilling in 2015 to remove space between her and Sanders. Clinton was among a minority of Democratic Senators to vote for the bill.As for Sanders, he voted both against Bobby Jindal’s Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act bill, which GOMESA was based upon, and the bill's final passage, where it was bundled with a bunch of other bills in the Tax Relief and Health Care Act which he was one of only 45 House members to vote against.To complete Hillary's flip-flop, from that PolitiFact article: "Clinton split with Obama this August after he gave oil companies permission to drill in the Arctic’s Chukchi Sea, tweeting: "The Arctic is a unique treasure. Given what we know, it's not worth the risk of drilling."Updated version... whoever makes these might think about adding in that Bernie says anyone who covered up the tapes of the police shooting in Chicago (Rahm Emanuel) should resign, while Hillary, of course, expressed complete confidence in one of the most corrupt men to ever sit in a congressional seat (Rahm Emanuel). Yeah, yeah, I know... she'll be calling for Rahm to resign too someday (or asking him to join her staff... you never know with her).
