There has been much in the national news about the “lawlessness” of the Obama administration, including this testimony of a self-proclaimed liberal law professor: “We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis with sweeping implications for our system of government[, which] threatens the stability and functionality of our tripartite system….” “We are now at the constitutional tipping point….” Unaddressed, however, is the manner in which the president’s disdain for the other co-equal branches is evident far from Washington.

That President Obama’s “anti-constitutional excesses”—as Representative Tom Cotton (R – 2th AR) characterized them—extend deep into the bureaucracy and into the most prosaic of cases became evident recently in a lawsuit filed by the holder of a Reagan-era federal oil and gas lease in Montana who seeks simply the right to explore for energy on his property.

In June of 1982, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) issued Sidney M. Longwell of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a 6,247 acre oil and gas lease in the Badger-Two Medicine Area of the Lewis and Clark National Forest in Glacier County in northwestern Montana. The next year, Mr. Longwell assigned the lease to America Petrofina Company of Texas, which later became Fina Oil and Chemical Company. In October of 1983, Fina submitted an application for permit to drill (APD) to evaluate the natural gas potential of that part of the Overthrust Belt.

After extensive review pursuant to the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), seventy-six (76) separate appeals, and a ruling by the Interior Board of Land Appeals (IBLM), the BLM, in consultation with the U.S. Forest Service, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, approved the APD in 1985, then again in 1987, once again in 1991, and finally in January 1993.

In April of 1993, seven environmental groups filed a lawsuit challenging the approved APD. Then U.S. Senator Max Baucus (D - MT) introduced legislation to bar any and all surface disturbances on oil and gas leases in the area and to evaluate the area for wilderness designation; he also demanded that President Clinton’s Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt impose a moratorium on oil and gas drilling there. In 1997, the lawsuit filed by the various environmental groups was terminated.

Meanwhile, in June of 1993, Secretary Babbitt suspended activity on the lease purportedly awaiting congressional action. In 1994 and 1995, he extended the suspension for the same reason. In 1996, he continued the suspension but asserted that it was necessary to comply with the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA). In 1997, Secretary Babbitt extended the NHPA-related suspension and finally, in 1998, he continued it indefinitely!

In 1999, in the face of the interminable delay, FINA assigned its lease and APD rights back to Mr. Longwell. In July of 2004, he assigned his rights to his company Solenex, LLC, which, in May of 2013, asked that the suspension be lifted and he be allowed to drill; that request was denied. In June of 2013, Mr. Longwell sued Secretary Sally Jewell and others.

Days ago, Obama administration lawyers told a federal district court that the suit must be dismissed because an Interior Secretary may suspend oil and gas leases indefinitely and federal judges cannot do anything about it. Besides, argued the lawyers, the 20-year delay is not “unreasonable” because the federal agencies have been working “hard” generating study after study, at taxpayer expense, of the proposed wildcat well.

Such contempt for the Constitution concerns more than just the law professors called to testify before Congress. The Obama administration’s refusal to develop energy on the third of the country owned by the federal government and open to that activity has real life costs. Over the last five years, as oil and gas production on State and private lands has increased by 61 and 33 percent respectively, production on federal lands has fallen by 6 and 24 percent.

Mountain States Legal Foundation, founded in 1977, is a nonprofit, public-interest legal foundation dedicated to individual liberty, the right to own and use property, limited and ethical government, and the free enterprise system. Its offices are in suburban Denver, Colorado.