Sen. Rob Portman is no rookie when it comes to governing. The Ohio Republican was in the U.S. House for 12 years; he served as the U.S. Trade Representative in the Bush/Cheney administration; he led the Office of Management and Budget; and he’s been a U.S. senator for over a decade.
In other words, those looking for a GOP lawmaker on Capitol Hill who has some idea what he’s talking about when it comes to policymaking tend to look to Portman.
It was against this backdrop that the Ohioan appeared on CNN yesterday and, as part of a discussion on gas prices, was asked whether President Joe Biden is right about oil companies failing to take full advantage of existing drilling leases. Here was the senator’s response, by way of the network transcript:
“No. I mean, with all due respect, let’s be specific. When the president was elected, he said we’re going to cut off Keystone, which is North American energy, which is what we’re talking about. Now, that was over 800,000 barrels per day, more than the Russian oil, which was 600,000 barrels a day. Second, the president issued an executive order stopping exploration on public lands and on water, public waters.”
Portman kept going, but let’s stop here because in short order, the Republican made three important claims.
First, he said Biden isn’t right about oil companies failing to take full advantage of existing drilling leases. On this, the facts point in the opposite direction. As Dana Milbank explained in a recent column, “U.S. producers still have 4,400 wells already approved and drilled that are not yet producing. They aren’t drilling more because of a shortage of workers and equipment and, particularly, investors’ greed. As The [Washington] Post reported, major U.S. oil companies say they would rather use their profits ‘to boost payouts to shareholders’ than ‘rush to drill new wells.’”
Second, Portman pointed to the Keystone XL pipeline, which wasn’t much better. As The New York Times reported last week, “By the time Mr. Biden rescinded its permit on his first day in office, just 8 percent of [Keystone] had been built. Even if Mr. Biden had greenlighted the project and TransCanada, now known as TC Energy, had won its court battles, it is unlikely that the pipeline would have been operational today given that the company estimated in March 2020 that it would have entered into service in 2023.”
And third, while it’s true that the Biden White House temporarily halted new drilling leases on federal lands shortly after the Democratic president’s inauguration, it’s also true that a federal court reversed the pause in June 2021. In the months that followed, domestic energy production increased. As a Vox report explained last week, “Biden has done nothing to halt oil leasing. In fact, the Biden administration has outpaced Trump in issuing drilling permits on public lands and water in its first year, according to federal data analyzed by the Center for Biological Diversity.” Portman probably knows all of this. What’s more, the Ohioan is retiring at the end of this year, so it’s not as if he has an electoral incentive to peddle partisan talking points to impress donors or his party’s base. But the Republican made the claims anyway, reinforcing concerns that when it comes to a discussion over gas prices, GOP officials have very little in the way of constructive arguments to offer.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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