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Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Madam President, I come to the floor today to talk about American energy.

Joe Biden is the President of high prices and of low approval ratings. Just yesterday, a gallon of gas sold for the highest price ever in the United States, and inflation is at a 40-year high.

Now, the American people clearly understand that radical Democrat energy policies are the cause of these high prices--the prices that people are paying every time they go to the pump to fill up.

On Thursday, the White House admitted, in terms of these high prices, that it is going to get worse. Of course, Democrats are trying to blame Vladimir Putin for the high price at the pump. Well, to me, it is dishonest, and it is desperate. Vladimir Putin didn't cause the inflation crisis that began in this country 12 months ago.

Now, Vladimir Putin has cashed in on America's inflation crisis. He has done it by selling more energy at high prices, and he has done it for more than a year. It has been his cash cow.

America's inflation crisis is specifically the result of Democrat spending and Democrat attacks on American energy. The two combined have added to the situation that we are in now, attacking American energy and massive spending.

Last March, Joe Biden signed the single-most expensive spending bill in American history. Even his own experts warned him not to do it.

Democrat economics expert Larry Summers, who had been Treasury Secretary for President Clinton, warned that this is going to cause inflation. Last February, the former Obama and Clinton adviser wrote in the Washington Post--this is from Larry Summers:

There is a chance that . . . stimulus on a scale closer to World War II levels . . . will set off inflationary pressures.

He said:

Inflationary pressures of a kind [that] we have not seen in a generation.

He is exactly right. That is what has happened. That is why we are at a 40-year high of inflation, and that is a generation.

Obama adviser Jason Furman said the same thing. He said that bill was ``definitely too big.'' He said: ``I don't know any economist''-- ``any,'' he said--``who was recommending something the size of what'' President Biden was doing.

Yet Joe Biden proved to be hard of hearing, refused to listen to what they had to say, signed the bill anyway, put $2 trillion on our Nation's credit card, and he flooded the country with government cash. Ever since then, this country has been in an inflation upward spiral.

At the same time, Joe Biden also had a stranglehold over American energy supply. He announced it during the campaign and enforced it the day he took office.

Energy is called the master resource for a reason. It powers our economy. It powers our military. It powers our Nation. It is critically important. When the price of energy goes up, so does the price of everything else.

Starting on his first day in office, Joe Biden has waged an all-out war on American energy. He shut down the Keystone XL Pipeline, and he bragged about it--no hiding from this one. He shut down oil and gas leases on Federal lands. He bragged about that as well. He shut down exploration for energy in the Arctic.

It was always interesting to see the senior Senator from Alaska, Ms. Murkowski, come to the floor and say over the last year that we are using more energy from Vladimir Putin's Russia than we are from Alaska, her home State, in terms of oil.

Those are because of Joe Biden's policies.

Now his lackeys at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission are making it almost impossible to build gas pipelines, to move gas from where it is explored to where it is needed. As a result, we are today actually producing a lot less energy than we were prior to the pandemic.

I heard the White House spokesperson. She talked about the fact that we are at record-high levels. We are not. We are at about 1.3 million barrels of oil a day--fewer now being produced in the United States than we were prior to the pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, we were No. 1 in production in the world. Now we are No. 3, behind Saudi Arabia and behind Russia.

What does lower supply of American energy mean? Well, in supply and demand, lower supply means higher prices.

When Joe Biden took office, a gallon of gas was at $2.38. It went up every month. Twelve of the last 13 months, the price of gas kept going up at the pump. Twelve of the 13 months that Joe Biden has been in the White House, the price of gas went up.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin was laughing all the way to the bank.

Joe Biden must be patting himself on the back right now about banning Russian oil, something that took him kicking and screaming to do after bipartisan Members of the House and the Senate came together and said: You have got to stop doing this.

It took him a couple of extra weeks to come to the realization that this body and the House, in a bipartisan way, were opposed to the delays--the ongoing delays--of this administration.

Now Joe Biden has his latest excuse for inflation. He said it is Vladimir Putin. The American people aren't buying it. In record numbers, they are not buying what the President is trying to sell.

The American people haven't forgotten the past year. It has been a year of high prices. It has been a year of misery and pain for families all across the country.

For Joe Biden, it has been a year of excuses. The excuses keep changing, but they are ongoing.

First, he said that inflation was transitory. He said it month after month after month after month.

And, then, remember when he said inflation was a good thing? Then, of course, he blamed corporate greed--always looking for somebody else to blame, always trying to pass the buck. Now he says inflation, which has been crushing American families, was because of Vladimir Putin, just 3 weeks ago.

Mr. President, people have been suffering under inflation, and their wages haven't been keeping up with the rising prices in this country for well over a year, since you took office. People recognize that. They remember the pain and the suffering in trying to go through Christmas, trying to decide whether they could afford gifts for the family; families who had to decide, living on a fixed income, if they could afford to eat or to heat their homes. That was all before Putin, and they haven't forgotten, Mr. President. Even though you may not think they remember, they do.

It is now 8 months until there are elections, and I know we are going to hear a lot more excuses from the Democrats in Washington between now and November 8. I expect the excuses are going to change a couple more times. None of the excuses are going to be believable. So they will keep trying to come up with another one.

Inflation sure wasn't transitory, not for a full year, not to a point where we are now at a 40-year high for inflation.

How about that idea when the President said inflation was a good thing? Actually, we heard it from the White House Press Secretary. We heard it from the White House Chief of Staff. They said inflation is a sign of high demand.

If our economy is doing so well, why don't the American people believe it? What kind of fantasyland is the President living in?

According to the Washington Post, Joe Biden's approval rating on the economy--how well he is doing in the economy--out of 100 points, he is at 37 percent approval. These are record-low numbers.

So Democrats can use their arguments all that they want. I think it just makes Americans want to reject anything the Democrats are trying to sell.

If Democrats are right about corporate greed, then, why have Democrats done nothing about it? They have run Washington for the past full year plus a couple of months. Democrats have had the time to introduce plenty of bills: bills to raise taxes, bills to take over elections, bills to pack the Supreme Court from 9 up to 13 members, bills to make Washington, DC, a State. What can they point to as an accomplishment to actually address and lower inflation? That is what the American people want.

Just this past weekend, studies are out. What is the No. 1 concern of the American people? It is inflation. What are Democrats doing about it? Nothing. They are making it worse.

So we are living in this world where Democrats and the White House continue to spin one story after another, and Democrat spokesmen for the party continue to try to convince the American people: Don't believe your own two eyes; believe them. The American people are smarter than that.

Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. It is about a year after the inflation crisis began. It is a great human tragedy, and it is heartbreaking.

Tomorrow, Members of this body will be having a video address by President Zelenskyy, the President of Ukraine, a heroic and courageous individual who is leading his nation with stubborn courage, historic patriotism, fighting for freedom. To try to tie this to the inflation that the American people have been suffering through for the last year is just wrong.

And 2021 was the worst inflation in 40 years, long before Putin invaded Ukraine. By the time Putin invaded Ukraine, gas prices were up in the United States more than $1 a gallon, and America was more addicted to Russian oil because that is what Joe Biden wanted. He wanted us to need more Russian oil. But that didn't stop Joe Biden from trying to blame the whole thing on Putin.

Former adviser Steve Rattner put it this way:

This is [Joe] Biden's inflation and he needs to own it.

Over the weekend, Larry Summers said this:

The president was wrong--

He is talking about Joe Biden.

He said:

The president was wrong to blame this month's [inflation] number on [the war in] Ukraine.

Larry Summers went on to say:

[Everyone] had been expecting, from the time before Putin launched the invasion, that inflation was going to accelerate.

He went on to say:

This is a consequence, fundamentally, of an overheated economy.

He said:

And we are not going to have a full solution until we do something about that overheated economy.

A full year has passed--one year in office, a 40-year high of inflation, and a year full of excuses by a President whose excuses do not add up. What adds up is the fundamental fact that American families spent $1,000 more on energy during Joe Biden's first year as President than they did the previous year. And it is going to be worse this year.

The time for excuses is over. There is no excuse for restricting American energy production. Democratic Senators spent 10 months denying that there even was inflation and doing nothing about it. Yet now some Democrats in this body are talking about making it even worse. They have introduced multiple bills to raise taxes. Astonishingly, one of the bills they have introduced is to raise taxes on American energy.

They already tried that last year with their reckless tax-and- spending spree. Now, it seems like some of them want to do it again. If we put more taxes on American energy, what is that going to do? It is going to raise the price even higher. Higher costs on producers are going to become higher costs on the customers.

People don't want us to raise costs; they want us to reduce costs. That is what they are complaining about. That is what we have gotten as a result of the Biden policies. We need to break this choke hold that the Democrats and the Biden administration have on American energy.

So how do we do that? Well, 2 weeks ago, I led a letter with every Republican on the Senate Energy Committee, and we sent it to President Biden on the morning after the State of the Union Address. We gave him a list of 10 specific actions that he could take today to produce more American energy and bring down the costs for American families.

Step one would be to end his Executive order on oil and gas leases on Federal lands. Half of my home State of Wyoming is Federal lands. There is an abundance of energy there. The American people need it. It will help reduce costs for families. It will actually bring tax revenue into the government, both the State as well as the Federal Government. Yet Joe Biden is not interested.

Joe Biden's Executive order has no basis in science, no basis in law. It needs to be rescinded today. The fact that some people have leases to explore for energy--a small number--is no excuse for the President's actions. Over 4,000 leases are awaiting permission to drill right now. They have a lease, but they are tied up in redtape and cannot get permission to drill from the government. So even if you have a lease, you need to then get permission from the government to use the lease. They ought to approve those leases today.

But we need to go further. We need a long-term commitment from the Government of the United States to produce American energy to help American families. Leases take years to explore and to develop. We need a commitment that is going to last long term. No one is going to make those kinds of investments if they think Joe Biden is going to shut them down again the next day.

Now, American energy companies have a lot of good reasons not to trust Joe Biden, not to trust those whom he has--the anointed ones whom he has appointed to high positions in the government.

If you just take a look at Joe Biden's nominees, they are a murderer's row of climate elitists and climate alarmists, and those are the ones that call the tune for this President.

If you took a year of Joe Biden's energy policies and take a look at what has happened over the past year that got us here today and you explain that to the American public and you say: What do you think about this? as they are filling up their tank, two-thirds of them would say: Under these Biden policies--two-thirds would say--the country is heading in the wrong direction.

That may be every Republican. It is also a lot of Independents, and it is also some Democrats as well who have buyer's remorse at what they have gotten from this President. It is going to take time to repair the damage. We need to start today. The time for excuses and blame from this administration needs to be over. The American public is demanding American energy, and we need it now.

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