At least 51 senators rejected the Build Back Better bill, including Joe Manchin.
The West Virginia senator reportedly forced fellow Democrats to scrap an offshore drilling ban from the massive Build Back Better Act spending plan, a provision that experts say would have had disastrous consequences for the country.
“An offshore drilling ban would be a disaster for our country, rolling out the red carpet for Russia and Venezuela to replace 20% of America’s daily production and costing Texas alone over 1 million jobs along our Gulf Coast,” Jason Modglin, President of Texas Alliance of Energy Producers, told Fox News Digital.
Modglin spoke in response to reports that Manchin convinced Democrats to abandon a plan to stop all drilling on rigs in the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean and Gulf of Mexico.
Ryan Sitton, founder and CEO of Texas-based reliability firm Pinnacle, echoed Modglin’s conclusion and said eliminating offshore drilling would embolden Russia, a country President Biden’s Pentagon deemed as an “existential threat” to the United States earlier this year.
“It simply makes Russia absolutely more powerful,” Sitton said.
Sitton explained that the U.S. would end up buying oil lost from the offshore drilling ban somewhere else since oil demand will only continue to rise. “When you decrease U.S. oil production, and you put more demand on the world for Russian oil production, it just makes Russia more powerful,” Sitton added. Gas prices hit a seven-year high in October, and Sitton said a ban on offshore drilling would only exacerbate that problem and “absolutely jack up prices again.”
Manchin’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Manchin, a moderate Democrat, is one of the last holdouts delaying passage of President Biden’s massive social and environmental Build Back Better Act. The West Virginia senator has expressed concerns over multiple aspects of the roughly $2 trillion package, including the continuation of the expanded Child Tax Credit program.
Faced with unified Republican opposition, Biden is trying to pass the package with Democrats alone, which the House has already done. But the path in the evenly split 50-50 Senate is more difficult, with no room for dissent.
