Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said Monday he is going to introduce legislation to suspend the federal gas tax, saving drivers 18.4 cents per gallon at a time when many Americans are feeling pain at the pump amid the war against Iran.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have increasingly eyed suspending the gas tax, with Republican members of Congress concerned about backlash from voters due to the rise in oil and natural gas prices since the beginning of the Iran conflict.
However, despite the increase in GOP support for suspending the gas tax, some Republican lawmakers previously opposed the idea under former President Biden. Here’s what a few of them said just a few years ago:
Josh Hawley
In June 2022, Biden officially backed the suspension of both federal and state taxes on gasoline while fuel prices skyrocketed.
“Today, I’m calling on Congress to suspend the federal gas tax for the next 90 days through the busy … travel season,” Biden said at the time.
The move was not received well by Hawley, who said on a radio show that “this is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard of.”
“I mean, what Joe Biden can do if he wants to have any effect on gas prices is to suspend and reverse his idiotic Green New Deal policies that are causing this crisis,” he added on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show.”
John Thune
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.), then the Senate Republican Whip, told Fox News in 2022 that Biden’s ask on the gas tax was “dead on arrival.”
“What the administration, of course, is coming up with is yet another gimmick, another Band-Aid and something they know is dead on arrival up here in Congress,” Thune told the outlet.
Mike Lee
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) on Monday replied to Hawley’s social media post stating that he was “introducing legislation today to suspend the gas tax” by saying that “the federal gasoline tax was introduced to build the interstate highway system.”
“That system is now built. We should now repeal the federal gasoline tax and let each state maintain its portion of the interstate highway system—with its own revenue—as was the plan from the beginning,” Lee added on the social platform X.
In a Fox News interview in June 2022, Lee said that Biden’s gas tax plan would “spike inflation even more.”
“If he just suspends this gas tax for a period of three months — first of all, he would end up extending the suspension before the midterms for the reasons you alluded to a minute ago — but even if it were just three months, there’s a lot of revenue that still has to — we still have to pay for the upkeep and the maintenance of our interstate transportation network,” Lee said on Fox News’s “The Faulkner Focus” with Harris Faulkner.
“Our interstate system. So, where’s that money going to come from, Harris? We’re just going to have to borrow more of it, effectively printing more of it. You know what that does? That spikes inflation even more. That’s why this is treacherous. This is wrong, and we can’t let it happen,” he added.
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