As President Donald Trump’s war with Iran drives gas prices higher, Republicans have settled on a strategy for addressing the rising costs: bicker with each other and leave Washington.
Some Republicans sought a vote on a gas tax suspension, others floated a ban on oil exports, and others still acknowledged that none of these ideas address the underlying problem — the war in Iran.
While senators have shown little appetite for action on the issue, the more volatile House Republican conference briefly considered a gas tax suspension. But that controversial idea led to a private shouting match, an angry social media post, and no legislative action.
Members of the House Freedom Caucus are seeking a three-month pause on federal fuel taxes in advance of the midterms. But Rep. Sam Graves, R-Mo., the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, was having none of it.
When Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., convened a meeting Tuesday night of the so-called “five families” — a term for the five ideological factions of House GOP — Graves came prepared to shoot down the Freedom Caucus’s proposal.
It just so happened that the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, tweeted four years ago about suspending the gas tax.
“Suspending the federal gas tax is just another Biden Administration stunt to distract from their self-inflicted crisis,” Harris wrote on X.
Graves decided to print out the tweet and bring it to the meeting. And when Graves read it to the group, Harris “got pissed,” according to a source who wished to remain anonymous to discuss the private meeting.
“This is war,” Harris shouted, according to the source.
Two sources told MS NOW that Harris then stormed out of the meeting, over the apparent pleas from Speaker Johnson to resolve the shouting match.
“I was disappointed,” Harris told reporters Wednesday. “The decision not to take the vote was made by Republicans, and again, look, the swamp won.”
Freedom Caucus member Rep. Clay Higgins, R-La., who supported the idea, railed against Graves on X, saying “establishment elitist Sam Graves” killed the gas tax proposal. “And he was rude about it. Unbelievable.”
Higgins told reporters the gas tax holiday was “a solid acknowledgement of the struggle the American people are facing with expensive fuel, as something we could do immediately, but some of my colleagues felt otherwise.”
Of course, Higgins’s support for a suspension of the gas tax is a reversal for him, too — only his turnaround didn’t take four years.
Barely two weeks ago, Higgins scoffed at the thought that his constituents would be impatient with the Iran war because of higher gas prices.
“Gas prices, man, go up and go down,” Higgins told MS NOW on Sept. 1. “You know, that’s a constant. In 20 years, if you’re still a journalist, you’ll be saying, ‘How do you feel about gas prices? Are you happy that they’re low, or are you mad that they’re high?’ It’s a constant, man.”
Graves declined to comment on the tense meeting, but he told MS NOW he opposes a suspension because it “disrupts” all state Departments of Transportation. He instead called on the administration to increase production.
“Open up our reserves. Open up everything,” Graves said. “Let’s drill.”
Eventually, Freedom Caucus members decided Republicans ought to take some sort of action, as regular gas averaged $4.37 per gallon and diesel cost a record high $6.31 nationwide on Wednesday, according to AAA.
While the proposal didn’t lead to any real legislative action, it did lead to the personal histrionics that have become a recurring feature of the 119th Congress.
Johnson acknowledged that the House had not coalesced around an approach to suspending the federal gas tax and said the cost of gasoline has “got to” decrease.
“I don’t know that we have consensus around what that would look like,” Johnson said. “There was about five or six different ideas on it. There’ll be a number of measures in the days ahead, working to lower gas prices as much as possible. Of course, there’s many factors in why gas prices are so high.”
The Senate, meanwhile, showed little expectation that Congress would do anything before lawmakers leave Washington for the campaign trail.
“Do I see Congress being able to take any action before we leave? No,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told MS NOW, chuckling at the question. “Might get some nominations done.”
The options for lawmakers are limited. There’s relatively little oil left in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve — 285,360 barrels as of Sept. 4 — the lowest total since 1982, according to the Energy Information Administration.
And that’s left lawmakers to halfheartedly floating ideas without following through on them.
“We could reduce gas taxes,” Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., told MS NOW on Tuesday. “That would be the quickest thing we could do.”
Is that likely to happen?
“I’ve not heard of anything,” Scott said.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said a ban on oil exports would make more sense than suspending diesel taxes, though he acknowledged that the disruptions to the Strait of Hormuz are the key issue.
“The export ban honestly makes probably more sense to me,” Thune told reporters Tuesday. “I think that suspending the tax is a short-term thing, and then you have great holes in the highway trust fund. But you know, obviously, the best thing is to get the strait open and have shipping lanes allow for the movement of those products and keep the flow of that global commodity going.”
Thune’s openmindedness about an export ban doesn’t extend to the rest of his party, though.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said the reactive approach of trying to keep the U.S.’s oil supply at home won’t work.
“We’ve become so interventionist in our strategies here,” Tillis told MS NOW Tuesday. “We’re always coming up with — and I’m not criticizing what John was saying — but we’re always skating to where the puck is, and then we find out it’s behind us.”
Lawmakers from corn-producing states have also been pitching their own idea for months. They want year-round availability of E-15, a fuel blend with up to 15% ethanol. Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., re-upped that campaign on Tuesday.
“E15 nationwide — up to 30 cents a gallon impact right away,” Rounds told MS NOW. “We’ve got the ethanol available, but if they would just authorize E15 instead of E10, that makes a major change in the amount that’s available.”
But that idea has already stalled, with oil and gas producing states staunchly opposed.
The Trump administration asked in June that an E15 measure be attached to a supposedly must-pass bill to fund the Iran war. That fizzled, as Congress failed to act on the spending package. It’s subsequently been put into the five-year farm bill, which lawmakers continue to work on, though it’s not up for a final vote in the near future.
The shortcomings of those plans have brought lawmakers back to the conclusion that gas prices are simply a waiting game. Beyond floating proposals that benefit their states and opposing measures that could hurt their constituents, Republicans are resigned to the fact that there’s only one real solution to the gas prices conundrum.
“End the war in Iran,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., told MS NOW. “That’s why the prices are up.”
Mychael Schnell contributed to this report.
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