Alaska senator blocks move to raise oil spill liability

A week ago, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) teamed up with her Democratic senatorial counterpart, Mark Begich, to introduce a bill that would raise the $75-million liability fund on economic damages from oil spills to $10 billion.
On Thursday, she blocked an attempt by Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) to expedite a bill seeking to raise liability, saying it needed further study.
Murkowski, who has received $1.2 million from energy and natural resource interests in her political career, said she feared the impact on independent operators in her state. She noted that the Exxon Valdez spill resulted in a $5-billion court judgment against Exxon, now Exxon-Mobil.
Menendez had harsh words for her reasoning, at a press conference Thursday:
"Some of the independent operators are $40-billion companies. So
this isn't mom and pop on the grocery store on the corner. And by the
way, even if you are smaller than a $40 billion independent company,
if you're drilling, if you're doing deep-sea drilling and the risk as
we have seen the risk be actualized, should you not be responsible?"
Menendez's Garden State colleague and fellow Democrat, Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, chided Murkowski's representation of the 1994 Exxon Valdez judgment, which he noted was fought fiercely in courts, and was reduced in 2008 to $507 million.