May want to pay Attention

On Saturday, I posted about the latest Executive Order Obama signed. The National Defense Industrial Resources Preparedeness. By today, all the right wing bloggers are reporting on it. The following is from gateway pundit. Listen up, people.

Friday afternoons, when no one is paying attention, seem to be Obama’s favorite time to release his Executive Orders. Last Friday, came another one; an update to an Executive Order created in 1994, the “National Defense Industrial Resources Preparedness”. The order gives the president the power to take control of all domestic energy supplies for the purpose of protecting national security, as well as, delegating greater power to each cabinet member to achieve this.

As Fox News points out,

President Barack Obama issued an Executive Order on March 16 giving the White House absolute control over all the country’s natural resources in case of a natural disaster or during a time of war.

In the order, the National Defense Resources Preparedness Order, the President granted to himself the authority to approve the dispensing of all domestic energy, production, transportation, food, and water supplies as he deems necessary to protect national security.

Despite the national defense hurdle that ostensibly must be jumped in order for the order to take effect, the text of the document itself does not limit implementation to a time of war. In fact, the specific sections of the order make it clear that the President can take complete command and control of the country’s natural resources in peacetime, as well.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air gave an analysis of this new EO in comparison to its predecessors,

Note what this EO specifically orders: identify, assess, be prepared, improve, foster cooperation. None of these items claim authority to seize private property and place them at the personal disposal of Obama. What follows after Section 103 are the directives for implementing these rather analytical tasks, mostly in the form of explicit delegations of presidential authority to Cabinet members and others in the executive branch.

Why the update? If one takes a look at EO 12919, the big change is in the Cabinet itself. In 1994, we didn’t have a Department of Homeland Security, for instance, and some of these functions would naturally fall to DHS. In EO 12919, the FEMA director had those responsibilities, and the biggest change between the two is the removal of several references to FEMA (ten in all). Otherwise, there aren’t a lot of changes between the two EOs, which looks mainly like boilerplate.