While concurring that President Joe Biden has "done something right" through his anticipated call to ban oil imports from Russia, Rep. Pat Fallon, R-Texas, on Newsmax Tuesday questioned the wisdom of relying on "people who don't like us" such as Venezuela, and Iran, and Saudi Arabia to replace Russia rather than depending on domestic oil production.
"We should be relying on ourselves," Fallon said on "Wake Up America." "Under President [Donald] Trump, we were energy independent. We need to immediately stop vilifying the American energy sector. Biden says, 'Buy American,' except if it's energy."
Biden has decided to ban Russian oil imports to further tighten the economic sanctions over the invasion of Ukraine, and could make his announcement as early, according to a source familiar with the matter.
Fallon, though, also called on an end to Biden's freeze on issuing new permits for gas and oil exploration on federal lands and offshore.
"We need to fast track pending liquefied natural gas export permits and stop all this regulatory nonsense," Fallon said. "It makes it very hard to finance the energy sector."
But even if Biden took the "cuffs off" restarting the Keystone XL pipeline project, "we wouldn't see anything" immediately as far as lowering gas prices, but the markets would start to relax, Fallon said.
"The markets also look forward and see what's going to happen six months from now, a year from now, [so] that would be a great first step, but it has to happen immediately," said Fallon, adding that Biden "should never" have changed Trump's energy policy.
"I just wish he went and watch Netflix instead of messing with anything, any part of President Trump's energy policy," Fallon said. "We would be a lot better off. Two years ago, the last March, President Trump was in office, gas was at $2.33. It's jumped 79% since then. It's unbelievable. It's one crisis after the next."
The congressman also discussed the ongoing crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border and said he expects further high numbers of illegal crossings to be announced for February.
"We've seen 11 months in a row for the first time in our history where there have been at least 150,000 illegal border crossings," he said. "This is the first time in our history we had a calendar year where there were two million illegal border crossings."
As a result, seizures of illegal drugs like fentanyl and methamphetamine are up, and the drug cartels, not the federal government, "are controlling our southern border," Fallon said.
"If you're not safe, then you're not free," he said. "Right now, the American people aren't safe. The leading cause of death between 18 and 45-year-olds in this country is fentanyl overdoses."
The high number of border crossings also is a humanitarian crisis, Fallon said.
"When you have a young woman that migrates from southern Mexico and Central America, the estimates are that 30% of them are sexually assaulted or raped along the journey," Fallon said. "How is that not a humanitarian crisis?"
Further, illegal immigration has added 2 million people to the U.S., and there are almost 4 million worldwide trying to legally enter the country, said Fallon.
"If we secured our border, it would be better for the people south of the border and north of it," he concluded.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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