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Floor Speech

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Mr. BARRASSO. Mr. President, I come to the floor today to talk about the Biden energy crisis that is affecting our country.

Now, Joe Biden has been threatening to declare a climate emergency. Democrats from New England, Members of this body, have been practically begging him to do so. They actually went to Massachusetts with him last week to try to twist his arm.

Democrats say this would give Joe Biden even more legal authority to restrict American energy. So that is what the Democrats want these days: less American energy--more expensive American energy, less American energy, and more power for Joe Biden.

Well, I have got bad news for the Democrats. The Supreme Court has ruled very recently, less than a month ago, that energy regulation requires ``clear congressional authorization.''

Congress writes the laws. It is the President who is just supposed to carry out the laws that are written by Congress. The President doesn't have the authority to just do whatever he wants by saying we have a climate crisis and then calling it an emergency. But Democrats are far too eager to give more and more of the Senate's power to the least popular President in the last 70 years.

Democrats say we have a crisis right now. Well, they are right about the fact that we have a crisis. We have a lot of crises in this country, and they are crises because of Joe Biden and because of the Democrats and the policies of this administration. We have an energy crisis. We have an inflation crisis. We have a crisis at the southern border. We have a crisis of crime in the cities. And as we come to the end of another month, millions of families are facing a crisis at home trying to pay their bills. The result is that Democrats have a crisis too. It is a crisis in the White House and in the party, a crisis of competence and a crisis of credibility.

Two-thirds of Americans say that this President and the Democrats are focusing on the wrong things. There was a poll last week in the New York Times. It showed that only 1 percent of Americans--1 percent--say climate change is their No. 1 priority. Now, that is of all people. What about Democrats? Only 3 percent of Democrats say that the idea of what the President is focusing on and trying to declare an emergency on, a national emergency--only 3 percent of Democrats say it is their top priority. What about the young people, the people who the Democrats always say: We appeal to the young people? Only 3 percent of people under the age of 30, voters under the age of 30, say that climate is their No. 1 concern.

The numbers are astonishing, and the President continues to ignore it. Working families aren't thinking about what the White House is calling the liberal world order, which is why the President wants to declare a climate crisis. Working families are trying to balance their checkbooks, trying to make it to the end of the month with some money left over to pay the bills.

People say: What do families want? I know, in my home State of Wyoming, I talk to families at the grocery on Sunday, traveling the State Saturday. We had folks all around the State coming together for Frontier Days in Cheyenne. People want to be able to pay for a full tank of gas. They want to be able to go to the grocery store and buy groceries for a week. And they want to have money left over at the end of the month--and the end of the month is coming--to pay their bills. That is all they are asking. Under this administration, they have been falling further and further behind, and it is becoming almost impossible to do those three simple things.

A survey from Bloomberg last week found that 60 percent of workers say they are worried that they can't support their family. They were doing it beforehand, but they can't do it now. You read stories of people losing sleep over the economy and their own financial well-being--or not-so-well-being.

People are putting off their dreams; they are giving up on their dreams and their hopes for themselves and their kids. The Joint Tax Committee has looked into this and said the average American family has already paid $1,500 extra for energy under Joe Biden as President. People are paying about $100 a week extra, more than they were when Joe Biden came into office, just to buy the things that they were buying last year.

So now here we are about halfway through this year, and it is really adding up. As a result, the savings rate is the lowest it has been since the great recession in 2009. No wonder consumer confidence has dropped again. The numbers are out this morning, and you look at the headlines. Here is one. It says, in July, consumer confidence slipped for the third month in a row, nearing pandemic lows. It goes on to say confidence is down 24 percent since last July. Inflation continues to bite. Inflation continues to bite.

That is why credit card debt is at a record high. This year, American people have opened millions of new credit card accounts just to pay for the daily issues of life struggles.

So my question is: Who are the 3 percent of Democrats who think climate change is their top priority? I know some are Members of this body. Well, they all seem to work here in Washington.

One of them is John Kerry, clearly. Last week, we found out that John Kerry--who I think is a climate czar or whatever his title is at the White House--has now taken 48 official trips on a private jet, his private jet as Joe Biden's climate czar. In total, those 48 trips have put 325 metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere.

Thank you, John Kerry. You know better than we do, though.

Now, this is what a vehicle would emit in 20 years. So John Kerry is flying around lecturing the rest of us from his position of smug superiority, and he emits more carbon and a lot more hot air than almost anyone on the face of the Earth.

If Democrats cared about our climate, they would tell John Kerry to park the plane and go home to one of your mansions. Even for Democrats, the hypocrisy is astonishing.

What about another one of these people who are focused on such a small amount of the 3 percent as well? How about Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Transportation, Mayor Pete? Last week, he said this:

The more pain that we are all experiencing from the high price of gas, the more benefit there is--

The more pain you are suffering, men and women and families all around America, the more benefit there is-- for those who can access electric vehicles.

How tone deaf. And this guy wants to be President. I would remind Mayor Pete that the wealthy who can afford electric vehicles will be just fine; it is everybody else who is suffering right now. Mayor Pete seems to think pain at the pump is a good thing for America--not the America that I live in, not the America that the people of Wyoming live in. The great majority of the American people don't feel that pain at the pump is a good thing, but probably a number of Members of this Senate body do.

Mayor Pete seems to like these high prices. He testified before the House last week and was asked about the cost of electric vehicles. Well, the average cost of electric vehicles is about $55,000. Oh, the price of electric vehicles, you may have noted, Mr. President, is up 18 percent this year due to Joe Biden inflation. Inflation is hitting everything and everyone. Even the electric vehicles are much more expensive now.

Does Mayor Pete think people have that kind of money sitting around? Do Members of this body, the Democrats, think that people have that kind of money available? People can't afford to eat. They can't afford to drive their cars. They can't afford to buy a full tank of gasoline.

PBS ran a story last week about senior citizens moving in together. Why? Because they couldn't afford their rent expenses. That is what people are experiencing under Joe Biden's Presidency.

And where does Mayor Pete think electricity comes from? He was a mayor; he should know. Right now in Texas, people with electric vehicles are being told not to plug in their electric vehicles between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. Don't plug them in. Well, why? To avoid overtaxing the grid, to avoid a brownout in communities.

This is at a point where you don't have that many electric vehicles in the economy and in the country. What if Biden got his way and more and more people were driving electric vehicles? We would have a blackout every day in the Joe Biden economy.

Now, electric vehicles can take hours and hours and hours to fully charge. Not everybody can wait that long. Not everybody has a job where they can email it in. A lot of people have to show up in person. They certainly have to in Wyoming. They have to work with their hands.

There is still a big gap in this country between renewable energy and reliable energy, and we need reliable energy. We need it all. Two- thirds of our energy grid still comes from traditional forms of energy.

Higher cost for energy? What does it mean? It means higher costs for everything else. And that is what people are seeing all around the country in Joe Biden's economy. For 15 months in a row now, prices have gone up faster than wages. So for 15 months in a row--that means for each of those months, people can afford less than they could the month before. Right now for the American people, as you saw from the consumer confidence numbers that are out today, there is no end in sight.

Later this week, we are going to find out a couple of things about the economy. Tomorrow, we are going to find out how much the Federal Reserve is going to raise rates. In the last 4 months, we have seen the largest increase in 40 years, and they are likely to go up again this week. Mortgage rates have doubled in the last 7 months.

Why is the Federal Reserve doing this? Well, they are taking desperate measures to try to fix the inflation that Joe Biden and the Democrats have forced onto the country. If there had been no inflation crisis, the Fed wouldn't be raising rates like this. So the blame for the rate increase is not on the Fed; it is on the Democrats. They are the ones whose policies--the Democrats in this body and the Democrats in the White House and the Democrats in the House--made the rate hikes necessary. The Federal Reserve is just trying to throw on the emergency brake because of inflation.

Joe Biden--and his spending, and he wants to spend more--is the guy who is fueling the inflation in a car that we just cannot afford to see crash. On Thursday, we are going to find out if maybe the car has already crashed because on Thursday, we will find out if we are officially in a recession. But it doesn't really matter if it is official or not because the American people can already feel the pain of a recession.

Two-thirds of the public has already made a decision in their own mind that we are in a recession right now. That is how they are feeling the impact on their lives. Four out of five Americans think that this country is on the wrong track under the Democrats and under Joe Biden. Yet the Democrats, with their desire to do more and more spending, and Joe Biden trying to do his Build Back Better routine--they want to keep us going right over the cliff. The Biden administration has to be the most out-of-touch administration since at least Herbert Hoover.

It is time to reverse course. Stop the attacks on American energy. We have some of the largest energy reserves in the world here in the United States. We have plenty of it in my home State of Wyoming. We ought to be using it. We have the best energy workers. We have the highest environmental standards of anywhere on planet Earth.

So the crisis facing our Nation right now is a crisis of choice: an energy crisis, an inflation crisis, a border crisis, a crime crisis-- all chosen by the Democrats and their policies.

Elections are coming. Midterm elections are a report card of the President halfway through a 4-year term. People are going to send a message that they are eager to change direction from the many crises that have been brought upon this Nation by Joe Biden and his liberal Democrat enablers--a crisis that the President and the Democrats are unwilling and unable to correct.

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