Well, that was fast. Barely 10 minutes into Thursday's landmark congressional testimony — where BP CEO Tony Hayward and other leading company executives are revisiting the Gulf Coast oil spill before a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee — the first controversial statement has entered the record.
[The latest coverage of the hearings, updated continuously throughout the day, is available from the Associated Press and from Reuters.]
And no, it didn't come from the gaffe-prone BP brass. Instead, GOP Rep. Joe Barton of Texas, the ranking member on the House Energy Committee, made a decisive splash in his opening remarks (from which Republican leaders immediately began distancing themselves). A staunch conservative who has a long record of backing oil industry interests, Barton apologized to BP CEO Tony Hayward for the "shakedown" the Obama White House pulled on the company. (Barton has received more than $1.5 million in campaign donations from the oil industry, according to Open Secrets, a nonpartisan watchdog group.) You can watch the video here — the apology begins at the 1:45 mark:
"I'm not speaking for anybody in the House of Representatives but myself," Barton explained, "but I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday. I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown. In this case a $20 billion shakedown."
[Photos: Obama meets with BP executives]
Wrapping up, Barton said: "I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, is subject to some sort of political pressure that is, again, in my words — amounts to a shakedown, so I apologize."
As Sam Stein of the Huffington Post points out, this isn't the first time that Barton has shown conspicuous deference to the interests of offshore oil drillers in deepwater. At a meeting of the House Subcommittee on Air Quality in 2004, Barton announced that "Offshore drilling and productions platforms are so technologically advanced that one platform on the surface of the water can handle production from several different wells several miles apart, house a myriad of technologically advances computer systems, enable people to face and conquer the adversisties of living in the middle of the ocean, and do so for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all without losing so much as losing a gum wrapper over the side of the platform. It is truly amazing."
— Brett Michael Dykes is a national affairs writer for Yahoo! News.
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