Steve Scalise: “Yesterday the President made a decision to raid 30 million barrels out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Now, of…”

“Yesterday the President made a decision to raid 30 million barrels out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Now, of course one thing the President did yesterday in that decision was he acknowledged that supply has an impact on price, which is a reversal of his previous statement. The problem is rather than actually opening up known reserves of American oil where we can go and create tens of thousands of American jobs and get rid of some of this dependency on some of these Middle Eastern countries, what the President said instead was he's just going to go and raid America's, in essence, our safety net. This Strategic Petroleum Reserve is there for national emergencies. It's not there just because maybe the President feels it would be politically popular for a couple of days to do something. This doesn't even get us past 2 days' worth of America's supply. We have known reserves that this President is shutting off all across this country. And we can actually reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil if we go out and create those jobs, create that American energy, rather than raiding our savings account for oil. And so the President's decision was a failed policy that doubles down on his previous failed policy on energy that has gotten us to skyrocketing gas prices. And of course we're going to be back here again in just a couple of days when this short-term fix runs out.…”