By Newt Gingrich
The controversies over the Arizona immigration plan and the Obama Administrations response to the oil spill in the Gulf may not seem related but they have a key common characteristic: both originate in the failure of Washington. In both cases President Obama faces a real danger of a political backlash from which he will be unable to recover.
More importantly they are both part of a rapidly evolving pattern of big government failure that will be a fundamental challenge to our country over the next quarter century.
Federal Failure on Immigration & Border Control
Before anyone criticizes the citizens of Arizona who are worried about their lives and their safety they should focus on the abject failure of the federal government to control the border and enforce our immigration laws.
Consider the facts on the ground:
- 15 of Arizonas state prisoners are illegal immigrants;
- The number of kidnappings in Phoenix Ariz. has exploded as the Mexican drug cartels have brought their violence North of the border;
- Two Phoenix police officers have been killed in recent years by illegal immigrants;
- A cattle rancher near the Mexican border was recently killed by a drug smuggler;
- Just last week a deputy sheriff was wounded in a gun battle with men suspected of being drug smugglers from Mexico.
In response to the dangers they perceived from Washingtons failure 64 of Arizonans overwhelmingly
support their new immigration law. Nationally 51 of Americans who have heard of the law support it with 39
opposed.
This is despite the frequent distortions and flat-out lies about the facts of the bill being reiterated in the mainstream media (
Byron York &
Andy McCarthy have been
especially good at setting the record straight.)
The Obama Administration will alienate the vast majority of Americans if it insists on attacking the Arizona law instead of solving the problems of an uncontrolled border and a failed immigration system.
The right answer for Washington is to meet its responsibilities:
- Control the border;
- Pass common sense immigration reform including a guest worker program and intense enforcement aimed at illegal employers (without whom there would be no magnet to draw in people outside the law); and
- Ensure that all Americans can live in safety in a law abiding country.
At that point the Arizona law would become moot and unneeded. Lets solve the problem not the symptom.
Federal Failure in Louisiana... Round 2
President Obama faces another challenge in the controversy surrounding the federal governments response to the oil spill in the Gulf. Of course this controversy has echoes of the Hurricane Katrina disaster which was enabled by government both in the failure to maintain the levee and pumping system and in taking too long to respond.
Today it is not yet clear what degree of responsibility the federal government has for the oil spill disaster. But every day we get new pieces of information that suggest this spill could have been contained if the federal government had acted swiftly and competently.
We know that Deputy Interior Secretary David Hayes said the Deepwater Horizon was inspected less than two weeks before the
explosion. However without knowing the cause of the accident it is impossible to know if something was missed that would have prevented the explosion or failure of the blowout preventer that should have shut off the oil flow.
We also know that it took over eight days for federal government to deem the spill a disaster of national significance and fully devote federal resources to the problem. In fact on April 23 the Coast Guard was still claiming there was
no leak.
Last week Louisiana lawmakers including Gov. Bobby Jindal pointedly
criticized the federal governments slowness in committing quantifiable resources to containing the spill.
Furthermore Ron Gouget who formerly managed the oil spill recovery department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has made the point that there has been an oil spill clean-up plan on the books since 1994 but federal officials took a full week before attempting to execute that
plan.
Even the liberal
New York Times has called the timetable of the governments
response
damning.
The Obama Administration now faces dual challenges in the Gulf and in Arizona. If it misunderstands and fails to respond effectively to these challenges it could suffer an equally serious loss of public support.
The Future of Offshore Development
This analysis does not in any way exclude British Petroleum (BP) from responsibility.
The spill will cause enormous environmental and economic damage to the Gulf region. Worst case estimates suggest that the spill could reach the
East Coast. Millions of Americans who make their living from the ocean will be affected.
However despite this disaster it is clear that offshore development must continue. In fact it must expand.
The spill while tragic does not change any of the underlying facts about Americas current or future energy and national security needs:
- Offshore drilling is still a viable source of new jobs for a struggling economy. One study shows that expanded offshore drilling could create as much as a million new jobs a year over the next three decades;
- Offshore drilling is still a key source of potential revenue for states struggling to balance their budgets. In 2009 offshore drilling generated more than $2.7 million for Gulf states as well as nearly $1 million for the Land and
Water Conservation Fund;
- Offshore drilling is still an essential component of a strategy to supplant the 11 million barrels of oil per day ($935 million) we import from other countries including dangerous dictatorships that fund terrorism.
This is why the cynical attempts from the left to use this disaster as an excuse to stop all development in the Gulf and elsewhere are so misguided.
There are over 3500 oil platforms in the gulf producing 1.2 million barrels a day. They support tens of thousands of jobs with about 35000 workers engaged in Gulf offshore activities at any
one time. At the current price of $85 a barrel shutting down all offshore drilling in the Gulf would force us to send an additional $102 million every day to foreign countries.
Those analysts who note this was the first American offshore well disaster since 1969 indirectly make the case for continued development. A once in 41-year event is something to be prepared for not something that should be allowed to increase our dependence on foreign dictatorships for energy.
Similarly those who point to the Exxon Valdez spill often fail to note that shipping oil is more likely to lead to a spill than drilling.
Investigate. Fix. Move Forward.
Ultimately this is a question about the character of America.
Will our response to this disaster be to stop litigate and lose our nerve? Or will it be the historic American response to challenges such as these: investigate fix and move forward with a safer system than before?
After the 1979 incident at Three Mile Island nuclear plant an independent commission was appointed to investigate exhaustively the cause of that event. The response was not to abandon nuclear power which produces 20 of electricity in the United States.
Similarly we should take the BP disaster very seriously.
Those who favor offshore development must respond with greater intensity than those who oppose development and have the luxury of unthinking opposition with no thought to the economic and national security consequences.
We should support a vigorous investigation that determines what investments could have avoided it and what the most effective cleanup system would have been. And then we should support a lean effective government to implement those
findings.
Effective Government not Big Government
The Founding Fathers were for limited but effective government. Peter Drucker the great information age management expert warned again and again that big government was inevitably bureaucratic and ineffective.
Alvin and Heidi Toffler have repeatedly warned that government is getting slower while the modern world is getting faster.
More and more we are seeing that ever growing government is no longer just a threat to our wallet; it is a threat to our personal safety. Both in Arizona and the Gulf we are being reminded that a massive federal government has been massively ineffective.
A limited federal government can better focus attention and resources on its core responsibilities which absolutely include controlling the border and large scale disaster recovery.
It is time to reform Washington by returning power and responsibility back to the state and local governments.
