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Floor Speech
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Mr. BARRASSO. Madam President, I come to the floor today to specifically talk about Americans' need for more American energy.
For the last year, the American people have been suffering from ongoing Joe Biden inflation. They are paying the price, they are feeling the pain, and it all started on day 1 of the Biden administration, when he took out his Executive order pen, and he killed a pipeline bringing energy from Canada to the United States.
And as this war on American energy has continued, we are now at a point where inflation is the worst it has been in 40 years. So it is no surprise that the President's approval rating has dropped to a low of only 40 percent in America.
Well, this incredible rise in prices for energy, as well as all of the other components--whether it is gas, whether it is groceries--but if energy gets more expensive, we know that it costs more to manufacture things, it costs more to grow things, it costs more to transport things from where they are grown or manufactured to market.
So much of this inflation has been brought on as a result of the Joe Biden policies related specifically to American energy.
When you look at the laws that he has promoted, the executive actions that he has taken from day 1, going all the way up to a speech he gave just yesterday, this is a President who is dancing to the tune of the climate elitists and wants to keep American energy in the ground.
Energy prices are up overall about 30 cents on the dollar since Joe Biden took over. They have gone up 8 months in a row. Gasoline prices are up by about a dollar a gallon, if not more so, since Biden took office.
I was at a high school in Greybull, WY, and started talking about energy prices. I asked if they know what the cost of a gallon of gasoline was, and the student body knew to within nine-tenths of a penny how much the cost of gasoline was in their hometown of Greybull, WY.
You can see it right up there, and people know the price, and they have been watching, since Joe Biden took over, the price of energy going up; and we have also seen Joe Biden's approval going down.
This isn't a coincidence. This is a direct result of the anti- American energy policies of this President and the Democrats in this body and this administration.
On his first day in office, his very first day in office, Joe Biden killed the Keystone Pipeline. He blocked new oil and gas leases on public lands. He has gone after energy exploration in Alaska.
And for the senior Senator from Alaska to come to the floor and go to an Energy Committee and say: It is hard to believe, but we are using more energy in the United States today, she said, from Russia than we are from Alaska, that is a result of the actions of this administration.
So what has happened with all of this? What has the impact been to American families?
Well, they are struggling. They are suffering. They are having to change the way they drive, the way they eat, the way they live. People can't keep up. Wages aren't keeping up with costs. They are just not. People's dreams are being crushed because they have to take the savings that they have been saving for different items they wanted to do and they have to use it to just get by, where it costs about $275 a month now, this year, to just get by compared to last year. Just to maintain a standard of living, people are having to pay $275 more each and every month, just to maintain and not to get ahead.
Apparently, according to the majority leader, the Democrats finally-- finally--yesterday at their lunch were going to talk about inflation. It is now February of 2022; Joe Biden came into office January of 2021. He said inflation was going to be temporary. A month, he said, after month after month after month, and now 10 months into a very serious situation, we still don't hear any practical solutions coming from the Democrats. We do hear gimmicks. We do hear gimmicks.
Joe Biden, in September, had his National Security Advisor, unbelievably, beg OPEC and Russia--Russia--to produce more oil. We are using twice the amount of crude oil now from Russia than we were a year ago. Vladimir Putin, who may any day--even this day--invade Ukraine, is still exporting 5 million barrels of crude oil a day. The price of oil is $90 a barrel, probably going to $100. The Biden and Democratic policies have been a jackpot for Vladimir Putin.
So, in November, after he tried the effort to beg Putin to produce more energy and sell it to the United States, the President went to another trick in his bag of tricks--another gimmick--and he said: Let's release some energy from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
So he said how much he was going to release. The Secretary of Energy was asked in a press conference: Well, how much is that relative to how much we use in the United States? She didn't have any idea. Turned out it was 2\1/2\ days' worth, and the impact of the release dropped the price by 2 cents a gallon--2 cents.
Oh, Democrats patted themselves on the back, and then prices went up again--a complete failure.
Now prices are expected to go even higher, as I said--maybe $100 a barrel soon. Many experts are predicting $4 a gallon when you go to fill up this summer. And now we hear another gimmick coming from the Democrats.
This time it is a temporary pause in the gasoline tax until after election day. So the New York Times had a story about it today: ``Democrats, With Eye on Midterms, Search for Ways to Bring Down Rising Prices.''
It is not because Americans are suffering, not because people at home, if the Democrats ever go home, are telling them how hard it is, not because they have an understanding of the needs of the American people--nope, none of those reasons. The Democrats, with an eye on the midterms, have introduced this legislation. When you look at the cosponsors, it is interesting that so many of them are people who are listed as ``vulnerable'' come the elections in November. This might be the gimmick to end all gimmicks. Suspending the gas tax--and, oh, by the way, bringing it back right after the election. It is all election- driven.
Are we going to need less energy after election day? Is there going to be more expensive energy after election day? That is what we get.
I found it interesting to see one Democrat stand up and comment on this. It is Larry Summers. He was an economic adviser and Secretary, Cabinet Member, worked with both the Clinton and Obama administrations. What did he call it? ``Short-sighted, ineffective, goofy, and gimmicky.''
Thank you, Larry Summers, for pointing out to the Democrats in this body what the American people already see--your efforts are ``short- sighted, ineffective, goofy, and gimmicky.''
Of course, the gas tax is the way that we pay in this country for roads and bridges. If the gas tax went away today, the American people and those kids in high school and grade school who can do the math, who know that the gas tax is 18 cents a gallon--Federal gas tax--knows that the increase in the cost of gasoline to what they are paying at the pump is still about $1 a gallon higher today than it was when Joe Biden became President of the United States.
This newest proposal by the Democrats is not about affordable energy; it is a cheap political trick. It might sound good in a press release. The kids in Greybull, WY, know it is not going to help them.
Democrats desperately want to look like they are trying to do something after ignoring inflation, denying it was even there in the first place. Yet, after months and months and months of the American people suffering, the American people know a gimmick when they see it. So Democrats have tried to spend 5 months passing their billion-dollar reckless tax-and-spending bill. The President calls it Build Back Better. That is what he called it yesterday when he gave a speech to a number of county commissioners. The bill includes electric vehicles so that they get subsidized. Of course, electric vehicles pay no gas tax because they don't use gas; they use electricity. So they don't subsidize in any way or pay to use the roads for the wear and tear on the roads that they drive. Yet the Democrats are calling for billions and billions of dollars of subsidies for those drivers. Nearly every Democrat in this body still supports this taxpayer giveaway.
Nearly every Democrat in the Senate still supports Joe Biden's war on American energy. Well, the war on American energy is raising the cost to American consumers.
As I said, if we are going to take 18 cents off the cost of a gallon of gas when it is already up a dollar a gallon or more, and by summer will be a lot higher than that, it is like putting a bandaid on a bullet hole. And Joe Biden, once again, yesterday, talked to these county commissioners, promoting his so-called Build Back Better plan, which includes the Green New Deal, which is increased taxes on American energy, increased regulations on American energy, increased penalties on producing American energy. The American people get the fact that will raise the costs for them to drive their car, to heat their home, to grow crops, to get items to market--where shelves are still bare, and they were this past weekend at the grocery store in Casper, WY.
Democrats still are delighted that we ended the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Secretary of Energy was supposed to come out with a report about how many jobs were lost by that. Well, still waiting for the report. Homework is past due.
Will we ever see the report from the Secretary of Energy who doesn't want to point out this specific impact that Joe Biden has had on this country in terms of killing jobs and raising energy prices?
The American people see through all of this. That is why only 3 in 10 Americans today support the President of the United States on what he is doing about inflation. That means that just about every Republican and every Independent and a whole lot of Democrats don't like the fact that Joe Biden is ignoring them, refusing to focus on the issues that are important to them and their lives and their families and their future; that their dreams are being stolen and ripped from them; that they have been using savings that they wanted to use for things they had been planning for years. And what we see is another gimmick coming from the Democrats only because their eyes are on the midterms. Their eyes ought to be on the people at home who sent them here in the first place.
There is a solution to the high cost of American energy, and that is to produce more American energy. Let us make it here. We have it. Oh, we have it in abundance. We have it in Wyoming. We have it all across the country. Produce American energy. Use American energy.
Vladimir Putin knows how to use energy. He uses it as a weapon, and he is using it as a weapon right now, holding Europe hostage. Germany has fallen into his trap with Nord Stream 2. He knows how to use energy. We have been in the United States an energy superpower. We are. We have the capacity to do it. We have gone from energy dependence to energy independence, to energy dominance. We need to return to the day when we are using American energy.
We are much better as a country and safer as a country and stronger as a country if we sell energy from the United States to our friends rather than follow the Joe Biden route of begging Vladimir Putin to sell some of his energy to us. That weakens America. It weakens us. It weakens our future.
We have the resources here in America. We have the know-how. We have the individuals wanting to work producing American energy. We need an administration which will allow us to do so, and we don't have one with the leadership in the White House and with the majority party in the House and the Senate right now.
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