Biden too slow in responding to pipeline cut off

 Washington Examiner:

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“The administration has to look like they're doing something so no one gets on the narrative that they abandoned a company and a pipeline to pirates,” a former senior Trump White House official told the Washington Examiner.

It would be several days before the Biden administration moved to lift a controversial shipping rule used to alleviate fuel shortages in the past, allowing non-U.S. flagged ships to transport fuel between American ports by way of a “temporary and targeted” Jones Act waiver. Past administrations have lifted the rule during natural disasters, using it to supply fuel to Puerto Rico during Hurricane Maria or to the Atlantic coast as Hurricane Sandy battered the Northeast.

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Biden delivered remarks on the issue Thursday, seven days into a crisis that has seen gas prices spike to a seven-year high and fuel shortages across the East Coast. He warned that people would not immediately feel the results of a major oil pipeline's return online.

“Don’t panic,” Biden said, speaking from the White House's Roosevelt Room before telling drivers to “not get more gas than you need.” To gas stations, Biden warned: “Do not, I repeat do not, try to take advantage of consumers.”

Through its 5,500-mile network that connects Gulf Coast refiners to terminals up the Atlantic coast, Colonial Pipeline supplies nearly half of the East Coast’s fuel needs. Drivers concerned by the outage sat in line for hours at the pump as gas stations across the East Coast began to run dry. It would take nearly a week for the pipeline to restart operations, with the White House using its daily press briefing for days in a row to address the crisis.

"We expect to see a region-by-region return to normalcy beginning this weekend and continuing into next week," Biden added.

By Friday, Biden had twice narrowly lifted the rule.

The first waiver was narrowly applied to a company’s single tanker, according to Bloomberg. The second, awarded to oil refiner Citgo Petroleum, with the company intending to ship approximately 200,000 barrels of petroleum from Louisiana, according to reports.

Lifting of the rule, which came nearly a week after Colonial alerted the public to its outage, came too late, according to a former senior Trump administration official, the process hamstrung by a legislative change that made more burdensome the process of waiving the rule.

Calling the initial waiver a “political ruse,” this former official said it was so narrowly crafted as to have only minimal effect.

“Politically engineering the waiver so that it checks the box while being so infinitesimally narrow that the maritime special interests are not incensed was quite the Kabuki theater move,” the source said.
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I think the Jones Act as currently written should be repealed.  It is a special interest law that makes the US more vulnerable to episodes like this one.  Biden continues to be the Democrat panderer in chief.  He puts the special interest of some above the interest of the people.