Anyone who has been victimized by EPA is a candidate for Cain’s anti-regulatory commission

Rep. William Cassidy (R-La.) joined with Republican presidential contenders in New Orleans last week to rebuke the Obama Administration for following “anti-energy” policies.

Those Americans who are most likely to be unemployed right now benefit from affordable, plentiful sources of energy that Washington D.C. policymakers have set back, Cassidy said during an interview at the Republican Leadership Conference (RLC) in New Orleans.

“On the one hand, President Obama’s rhetoric says he is about domestic energy development,” Cassidy noted. “But his regulatory and taxing regime is anti-domestic energy.”

The congressman also dismissed the idea that new “green jobs” would help to re-charge the economy.

“The president kept saying, don’t worry the jobs that are destroyed will be made up by these other jobs, but this has not occurred, and it seems unlikely to occur.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Georgia Republican, upped the ante and described Obama’s energy policies as “anti-American.”

“We have 20 percent less production in the gulf of Mexico today than was projected because his moratorium and his regulatory policies are anti-American energy and are killing jobs in Louisiana.”

Herman Cain, former chairman and CEO of Godfather’s Pizza, also addressed the conference as a Republican presidential contender. Anyone who has been victimized by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he said, would be eligible to serve on his proposed regulatory reduction commission.

“Whenever science does not back up a regulation, it’s gone,” he said.

Cain also said he would put “booster-rockets” on permits for more oil drilling in the Gulf.

Kevin Mooney is an investigative reporter with the Pelican Institute for Public Policy. He can be reached at kmooney@pelicanpolicy.org and follow him on Twitter.