The Gulf oil spill that's so bedeviling President Obama has its roots back in the Clinton years. In 1995, President Bill Clinton signed the Outer Continental Shelf Deepwater Royalty Relief Act, which exempted oil wells drilled deep in the Gulf from the normal royalty payments to the government. Usually, these payments amount to between 12 percent and 16 percent of their revenues, so the exemption did a great deal to catalyze drilling in deep waters in the Gulf of Mexico. The Deepwater Horizon well, where drilling began in 2001, was one of those catalyzed by the Clinton legislation. Overall, deepwater...