Bashing Exxon Profits, Meeting With Saudi Prince

• Biden has few choices to cut gas prices and avert a political wipeout.
• He’s making a big bet by bashing Exxon and traveling to Saudi Arabia next month.
• “Begging MBS for oil won’t reduce gas prices,” Rep. Ro Khanna of California said in an interview.

President Joe Biden is staring down a political wipeout within a few months.

A spike in oil and gas prices is threatening to deal Democrats a decisive defeat in the November midterms. The national average for a gallon of regular gasoline rose past $5 last weekend for the first time. It’s a 10 percent jump from a month ago, reflecting huge consumer demand outstripping the available supply of oil paired with severe aftershocks in energy markets from the war in Ukraine.

The grim political outlook for the White House was compounded with an inflation report that came in worse than many economists expected. It showed prices for groceries, airfare, and rent increasing at their fastest pace in four decades. Biden has since doubled down on his pledge to combat rising prices and make it the top domestic priority.

But the surge in gasoline prices underpins the current inflationary spiral. It’s burdening businesses with bigger bills for electricity, air travel, and shipping, raising prices across the board for Americans. There seems to be few options left for the White House to reverse the supply crunch. It already committed to the release of one million barrels per day from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in May, eased regulations on ethanol fuels, and tried unclogging ports.

“President Biden is using basically the full suite of tools that are available,” Jonathan Elkind, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told Insider. “It seems to me the Biden administration has been doing many of the types of things that make sense.”

But those moves failed to provide relief at the pump, and its prompted Biden to make a big bet with gas prices climbing with no end in sight. He’s bashed Exxon and rebuked other large oil companies for running up huge profits in a letter, signaling a more aggressive approach against a sector that he’s urging to quickly ramp up production.

He’s poised to meet Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman in July, despite vowing to turn Saudi Arabia into an international pariah over the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent critic of the Saudi royal family and a journalist who resided in the US.

It remains to be seen if going after one bogeyman in the form of Big Oil and cozying up to another in the form of a questionable ally will be enough to tamper gas prices and keep Democrats from losing one or both chambers of Congress this fall. 

Democrats aren’t comfortable with turning to Saudi Arabia for more oil

The possible image of Biden shaking hands with a Saudi leader who is the reported mastermind of Khashoggi’s assassination is enough to prompt unease and criticism among his Democratic allies.

Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia told Insider he thought the meeting was a “bad idea,” adding it was his “intuition” that the president’s trip was at least partly meant to prod Riyadh into stepping up oil production.

“Begging MBS for oil won’t reduce gas prices,” Rep. Ro Khanna of California, a prominent House progressive, told Insider. He added Biden should establish preconditions such as pushing the Saudi government to lift its…