(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) Rep. Warren Davidson, R-Ohio, joined a growing chorus of condemnation over President Joe Biden using his administration’s reckless raid on the country’s strategic oil reserve as a political weapon, artificially suppressing gas prices to help “juice” the mid-term elections for Democrats.
“He’s taking the strategic petroleum reserve and depleting it, doing what he can in the near-term, but with great peril,” Davidson told Newsmax’s Saturday Report.
“I mean, we have that strategic [oil reserve] for a reason. It’s not meant to be juicing something artificially for an election cycle.”
Biden’s SPR raids are slated to end next month and industry experts have warned it will produce a savage spike in gas prices that will hit after the Nov. 8 election, where control of both the House and Senate is at stake, with prices likely skyrocketing to above $5 per gallon by the end of the year.
With criticism growing about the depletion of the SPR, and with news gaining increased exposure that the raids will end next month, a group of House Democrats desperate to forestall any potential bad news before the midterms, is demanding that the oil thieving continue until the end of the year.
House Democrats “urged Biden on Friday to immediately scrap his current plan to halt releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve next month,” CNN reported.
“With the national average of gas and oil prices still too high, it is clear Americans will need continued relief for the foreseeable future,” the group of eight Democrats said.
Their demands come after Biden in April made a political decision designed to abate soaring gas prices caused by his administration’s failing domestic policies. Biden announced his intent to raid the SPR by releasing up to 180 million barrels of oil — about 1 million barrels a day — for six months. It marked the largest SPR release in a half-century and, critics contend, illegally drained the emergency reserve to its lowest levels since 1984.
“The American people deserve to know more about DOE’s plan to backfill the SPR,” Republicans on the House Oversight Committee wrote after Biden made his pronouncement without offering any details on how he planned to rebuild the reserve he was raiding.
“The SPR is intended for emergency supply chain disruptions — not as a stop gap to make up for the Biden administration’s war on domestic energy.”
Biden has not only used the SPR raids to artificially lower gas prices domestically, he’s also sold tens of millions of barrels to foreign nations, including China and companies with links to the militarized wing of the Chinese Communist Party.
That would include roughly 6 million barrels sold to Unipec America, the U.S. trading arm of Chinese state-owned oil company Sinopec, which has ties to a private equity fund founded by Hunter Biden, reported the Epoch Times. Democrats last month again stopped attempts by Republicans to prohibit the sale of SPR oil to China and other foreign adversaries.
Earlier this month, the Biden administration withdrew nearly 8.54 million barrels in seven days, the biggest weekly drain in history, according to Zero Hedge.
While the SPR releases have artificially kept gas prices lower than they would have been without the raids, and boosted Biden’s approval rating in the process, the results have still left the country reeling from prices at the pump that are up 76% since Biden took office.
BIDEN: “The price of gas, when we said what I was doing wouldn’t make any difference, well guess what, it’s down $1.30 since the start of the summer.”
The price of gas is WELL OVER $1/gallon higher than when Biden took office. pic.twitter.com/uxYbP2F3Zc
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 12, 2022
“But ‘average joe’ doesn’t care about ‘president joe’ actions to weaken the nation’s ‘strategic’ reserve to save his party from a bloodbath in the Midterms,” wrote Zero Hedge.
By the end of next month, the SPR is projected to sink below 360 million barrels, a 40-year low, enough to provide just over three weeks of US consumption based on historical trends. None of which seems to matter to the Biden regime and Democrats looking to avoid a predicted red wave, no matter how hard their actions hit consumers.
