Quote:
“Joe Biden caused this and doesn’t seem to care,” Nathan Brand, the Republican National Committee’s deputy communications director, tweeted Tuesday about the new record. The party’s rapid response director, Tommy Pigott, captioned a 2019 video of Biden pledging to end fossil fuel with, “The pain at the pump is the point.” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., who co-sponsored a GOP bill to cut off Russian oil, was one of several elected Republicans demanding that Biden “take the shackles off American energy.”
In the race to politically exploit the high cost of gas, Republicans are banking on voters not caring that they’re lying through their teeth about how much of this is Biden’s fault. The president does not, as they would have you believe, have a dial in the Oval Office that he uses to set gas prices. Meanwhile, suggested fixes the GOP has offered up would do nothing to shrink Americans’ costs, which suits them just fine for now.
Quote:
But is there anything to the idea that Biden’s policies so far have blocked the U.S. from producing and importing even more oil? Well, not really. The death of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada is a favorite talking point for Republicans, but that pipeline wasn’t even scheduled to be operational until next year, which would have no impact on today’s gas prices. Likewise, Biden’s pause on licensing new federal lands for drilling, which was overturned in court, didn’t stop those licenses already issued from being used; there are also 9,000 approved permits that haven’t been used yet.
