Rep. Markwayne Mullin told Newsmax on Monday that the Biden administration's energy policies make the United States ''more dependent on communist countries than ever before.''
''A lot of people may not realize that China controls four of the five largest rare Earth mineral deposits in the world,'' the Oklahoma Republican, who is running for Senate in a special election on Tuesday, said on ''The Chris Salcedo Show.''
''The one they don't control is in Ukraine, which their buddy Russia is trying to control. That means this energy package only puts us more dependent on communist countries than ever before.''
President Joe Biden recently signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains measures that would affect energy, the environment and climate change, including provisions that promote the deployment of clean energy, according to The Hill.
Earlier this month, NPR reported that the U.S. government made a breakthrough battery discovery on taxpayer dollars and then gave the technology away to China.
Ten years ago, a group of engineers and researchers developed a vanadium redox flow battery in a warehouse in Mukilteo, Washington. About the size of a refrigerator, the batteries stored enough energy to power a house and could be used for decades.
According to NPR, instead of the batteries becoming the next great American success story, a Chinese company is manufacturing them more than 5,200 miles away, in Dalian, China, after the technology was given to the communist nation by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Mullin told host Chris Salcedo that ''this is what happens when you don't have citizen legislators.''
''You have individuals that think government is to create jobs and government's role was never designed to create jobs,'' he said. ''It was to create an opportunity, an environment for job creators to create those jobs, and the problem is that we have too many politicians and not actually job creators in Washington, D.C., and they lose focus.''
''They lose the role of government because their idea is if we grow it, then we'll have more responsibility,'' he continued. ''But, as we look at different decisions that have come out of the [Supreme Court], as we grow it, Congress actually concedes power to agencies, like the Chevron deference. What we need to make sure we do is put it back in the hands of the people.''
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