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Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about the need that we have here in this country for more energy--and specifically, more American energy.

On Thursday, Leader Schumer and Nancy Pelosi held a press conference, and they announced they had finally come up with an energy plan. After nearly a year--a year of Joe Biden's energy crisis where he killed the Keystone XL Pipeline, struck down leasing--it is good to see they finally have a plan.

It turns out this official Democrat energy plan is not going to create one more drop of American energy. So what will the plan do? Well, if you look at it, you will see it sends bureaucrats--unelected, unaccountable, heavy-handed bureaucrats--to shake down energy companies. Instead of producing more American energy, they want more Federal investigations into American energy.

It won't lower the price of energy--no, not by a single penny. If anything, it might actually increase energy costs across our country. People in Wyoming this past weekend were paying $4 a gallon for gasoline. It doesn't take a Federal investigation to figure out what is wrong here with energy in America. We know why prices are up: supply and demand. Very simple. Demand for energy is up, and supply is not. Supply is actually down.

Yet, after a year of high prices, Democrats still refuse to admit it, ignoring inflation, not facing the facts that we have the American energy in the ground here and they won't let us get it out.

But now the Democrats are coming up with election-year conspiracy theories. They say high prices aren't happening because of the law of economics. They are saying it is happening because of secret backroom deals. Democrats claim it is an international conspiracy rigged by a global oil market. Instead of producing American energy, Democrats want to produce excuses, one after another.

At the Democrat press conference, the majority leader said: ``The American people didn't send us here to point fingers and blame each other.'' They ought to point fingers at themselves. That is exactly what the Democrat leader and the President have done for the last 15 months since the day Joe Biden took office. They blamed inflation on coronavirus, then they blamed it on economic growth, then they blamed it on corporations, they blamed it on ports and shipping companies, they blamed it on Vladimir Putin, everyone except themselves who are the cause of the problem.

They will blame anyone, as long as they don't have to change their radical and reckless policies. But they won't deal with the problem. Right now, Democrats basically point to the fact that they are determined to give the American people more of the same, and it is the same things that have brought Joe Biden's approval numbers to an alltime low--on the inflation, on economy, on the cost of energy-- alltime historic lows, for a President who should know better but is following the lead of the liberal radical left.

So people are going to be facing more inflation, more high energy costs. And it now costs so much to fill up a tank of gasoline; it is over a hundred dollars to fill up, and I saw that repeatedly across Wyoming last weekend.

This is the same level of anxiety for hard-working families at the end of every month when the paychecks don't keep up. On Sunday, just this past Sunday, the cost of diesel hit an alltime high. Not just a 40-year high like we have for inflation, an alltime high for diesel fuel.

Diesel prices have doubled since Joe Biden took office. Higher diesel prices means it will cost more to transport goods to market. Food prices are up; everything that one buys at the market is up. No matter how bad it gets, Democrats refuse to change course.

Joe Biden continues to attack American energy and American energy workers. Right now, Joe Biden's administration are blocking oil and gas leases at 80 percent of the available Federal lands. There are thousands of drilling requests that are in limbo, which is where Joe Biden has put them.

He has done everything possible, you would think, to undermine investment in American energy. Told the banks, don't lend. Told businesses, don't invest. An attack on direct--on jobs and affordable energy.

If Democrats were really serious about lowering energy prices, they would stop their war on American energy. We need to unleash American energy, not keep it in the ground. Look, Democrats remain the party of higher costs, the party of expensive regulations, the party of high taxes, and the party of greater reliance on foreign countries.

Working families cannot afford the Democratic agenda. People feel stuck or stressed. They are squeezed by inflation. They are squeezed by high energy prices. They have to make decisions about how they drive and how they eat and what they eat and how they live.

The Democratic policies have brought us all of this. We need to replace the Democratic policies; and come November, we are going to replace the Democrats in the House and in the Senate.

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