During a press briefing earlier this month on the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack, Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm showed the administration’s cards on its approach to energy policy when she said, “You know, if you drive an electric car, this would not be affecting you.”
By this point, fears of gas shortages had inspired a full-blown panic, yet here was the secretary of energy implying that if you drive a car that uses gas, you had it coming. It set off alarm bells with many Americans who suspected this was a signal of things to come.
The White House may not have engineered the gas shortage, the administration reasoned, but it seemed satisfied to point out that if we had embraced a green agenda sooner, none of this would be happening. At that same press conference, Granholm acknowledged that “pipe is the best way” to transport fuel, but has since refused to reconcile her statement with President Joe Biden’s purely political decision to kill the Keystone XL pipeline.
In a sane world, with gas prices still through the roof just in time for Memorial Day weekend, the White House would have at least provided clarity. But we no longer live in a sane world, and the White House has no reason to offer a light at the end of the tunnel. After four months and $7.1 trillion in approved and proposed new spending, Biden and his lieutenants in Congress have made it clear they’re not above making a point at the expense of the American people. Policy pain isn’t a mere consequence of the 2020 election. It is the point of the exercise: make it hurt until what was once radical seems inevitable.
On day 1 of his administration, Biden chose the value of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 over the thousands of jobs and economic opportunities that evaporated with Keystone XL. Environmental activists nodded along with his reasoning, but seasoned industry professionals shook their heads — they knew what was coming. Enter the baffling $2.7 trillion spending plan the White House hawked as infrastructure investment, but that virtually ignores roads, bridges, and broadband in favor of unaffordable line items from the Green New Deal. Experts were quick to warn that even with the 15 years of new tax hikes it would take to pay for these programs, imposing a mandate now would force everyone from Uber drivers in Anaheim, California, to small business owners in Knoxville, Tennessee, to choose between bankruptcy and dependency on built-in government handouts.
It’s a curriculum we’ve seen before: use brute legislative force to implement policy, terrify families and business owners with the consequences of resistance, and then present a tax-and-spend “fix” as the only way forward. Based on what we’ve seen so far, then, things are all going according to the Democrats’ best-laid plans. They’re hoping that Americans will question every gallon of gas they buy this weekend. They’re betting on those gallons serving as a reminder of the stress caused by empty tanks and darkened fuel pumps. The cruelty of robbing families of their first respite in over a year is not lost on this group — if anything, it enhances the effect.
Power flows down the path of least resistance, and the Democrats have made a good case to suggest that they’re willing to spend the next two years inflicting as much fear and misery as it takes to transform the radical into the inevitable and eliminate that resistance for good.
Marsha Blackburn, a Republican, is the senior senator from Tennessee.
