As of today, Republicans are still enjoying an 11 point advantage in polling for the November election.
The 2022 midterm elections are now 235 days away, and Republicans have an 11-point lead in their bid to recapture control of Congress.The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that, if the elections for Congress were held today, 50% of Likely U.S. Voters would vote for the Republican candidate, while 39% would vote for the Democrat. Just five percent (5%) would vote for some other candidate, but another seven percent (7%) are not sure.
Polling also shows Biden at 60% disapproval.
One of the issues driving this historic approval for the GOP is anger at the rapidly escalating energy cost. American voters appear to be unpersuaded by the Biden administration’s attempts to blame either Putin or the gas companies for the issue.
Therefore, Team Biden has given the thumbs-up to re-starting the leasing of federal land for oil and gas drilling.
The development is the latest in a string of stops and starts to the federal oil and gas leasing program since President Joe Biden took office in January 2021. Biden pledged during his presidential campaign to halt federal drilling auctions, but that effort has been stymied by a court challenge from Republican-led states.Just a month ago, the Interior Department said it would delay upcoming federal oil and gas lease sales because a Louisiana federal judge blocked the administration from using its “social cost of carbon” value to factor the risks of climate change into decisions on permitting, investment and regulatory issues.Then earlier this week, a federal appeals court allowed the government to continue, temporarily, using the value of around $50 per ton of greenhouse gases emitted. The White House had reverted back to an Obama-era value, which is far higher than the roughly $10 a ton imposed by the Trump administration, early last year.
I covered the Louisiana judge’s ruling about the “social cost of carbon” in a post that warned of gasoline price hikes in the wake of Ukraine’s invasion by Russia. Judge James D. Cain Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana logically deduced that the Biden administration’s calculations “artificially increase the cost estimates” of oil and gas drilling.
Yet, the administration is now making a bizarre move. A federal appeals court has revived a Biden administration continuing efforts to impose regulations based on the “social cost of carbon.”
…[A] panel of three 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges in New Orleans unanimously stayed the lower court in a ruling dated Wednesday, meaning the administration can continue using the policy while the case goes on.The panel said any regulatory burdens the policy might bring are speculative at this point and that Louisiana and other states challenging the policy therefore had no standing to sue….Biden on his first day in office issued an order that restored the cost estimate to about $51 per ton of carbon dioxide emissions after the Trump administration had reduced the figure to about $7 or less per ton. Former President Donald Trump´s estimate included only damage felt in the U.S. versus the global damage captured in higher estimates that were previously used under the Obama administration.
Biden is likely to find that the social cost of his policies will be very high in November.
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