“It’s another example of how hostage the Democrats are being held to their far-left agenda. Voting against an energy emergency in this country when we clearly have an energy emergency—you look at just as an example electricity, you have artificial intelligence, you got data centers, you got crypto mines, all of these things are incredibly power-intensive, and then of course the Democrats wanted to have everybody already driving electric vehicles,” Thune said. “We don’t have enough energy in this country. Oil and gas, I would say any American form of energy, there’s more of a conversation around nuclear again, obviously there are renewable energy sources, but we ought to be for all things that are American energy. What reconciliation will give us an opportunity to do is again make clear to the American people that we view America as not only being energy independent but energy dominant and to take advantage of the rich supplies we have in this country to fuel our economy but also to help some of our allies around the world who have become way too dependent upon countries like Russia and China for their energy needs. We’re looking at opening up areas of development—the president has already done some of that through executive order—we want to codify some of those things and just make sure we as a country are doing everything we can to make sure our people in the United States of America are never getting in a position where a country, particularly an adversarial country, where we become dependent upon them for our energy. Then hopefully we produce not just enough for our own population but maybe enough to help other places around the world.”

In addition to all of these things, Thune highlighted Senate GOP efforts to roll back Biden regulations using a mechanism called the Congressional Review Act (CRA).

“The Biden administration, as you could expect, characteristically relied heavily on the use of regulations to implement their agenda,” Thune said in the interview taped last week. “A lot of their agenda of course was the Green New Deal. It was a lot of their climate agenda. But what it did was put this huge wet blanket on top of our economy. It drives up costs for consumers. It makes it more expensive for businesses to invest in this country. It gives them all kinds of new rules and regulations and red tape to comply with so a lot of that, there is a provision in law that was added back in the 1990s that allows you to–when an administration overreaches in an area of regulations–Congress can through a resolution of disapproval pull that back. So we’re doing that with a whole bunch of Biden-era regulations and there’s a certain amount of time in which you have to do it, and we hit that clock next week. We’re doing a bunch of them this week, and a bunch of them next week, to do as many as we can before the clock runs out. But in the Biden administration, the heavy hand of regulation was felt everywhere. But certainly, probably most notably in the energy sector of our economy but also too in the everyday lives of average people. There were so many of these regulations that just piled on more cost. People are ready to be liberated from that so we’ve had lots of success. The House has moved a lot of them. We’ve moved a lot of them. The president has already signed a bunch into law, and we’re going to give him a bunch more to sign.”