From Tuesday night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On President Obama’s making BP establish an escrow account to pay damages:

There are questions about the legality … I don’t believe that he has the legal authority to force a company into establishing an escrow fund which would be administered by a third party. But he knows that the British Petroleum company is on the defensive. And even though he may not have the law on his side, he’s got public opinion on his side, so he may be able to force that.
On the other hand, when he went and took over the auto companies, he nationalized GM and Chrysler, he didn’t exactly – he wasn’t worried about the law standing in his way, where at the time he overrode all the precedents and basically stuck it to the bondholders so he could protect the auto unions.
So the law hasn’t exactly been an obstacle in doing what he wants to do . . .
But it isn’t a good precedent, particularly since the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which was passed after the Exxon Valdez, has a cap on damages of about $75 million, and here we‘re talking about tens of billions.
You can’t enact that retroactively but he‘ll try to force it using the weight of public opinion behind him.