Eight months ahead of an election that the GOP is increasingly eager to turn into a referendum on rising gasoline costs, the two parties are recommitting to familiar tool kits for addressing a thorny issue that reaches beyond the United States' borders.

Lawmakers yesterday fired off their competing arguments in the new pump-price culture war at a hearing that found the House Energy and Commerce Committee's top Democrat challenging an ideologically diverse group of witnesses to contend that energy self-sufficiency would not shield the United States from ups and downs in global oil costs.

No direct rebuttal came to Rep. Henry Waxman's (D-Calif.) assertion that "even if we produce as much as we consume, we'd still have to pay the world market price for crude." Republicans and industry representatives countered that new supply -- such as the fuel poised to travel through the Keystone XL pipeline and, potentially, through new offshore and onshore rigs -- is the only cushion against the vagaries of worldwide pricing.

Bringing new oil sources online would "change the global economic dynamic," providing more confidence to markets rattled by Middle East uncertainty, American Petroleum Institute (API) President Jack Gerard told lawmakers.

Democrats, however, are largely aligning in favor of the "all of the above" strategy pitched by President Obama that relies on a five-year offshore leasing plan and rise in domestic oil production slammed by API and the GOP as thin gruel at best.

"I think it's time we stopped BSing the American people," Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) said yesterday, savaging as a "magic wand" GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich's vow to lower gasoline prices to $2.50 per gallon if elected. "A barrel of oil produced in Venezuela costs the same amount as a barrel of oil produced in Texas. We don't control the price."

In fact, a barrel of oil from a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) such as Venezuela is traditionally priced according to a different benchmark than the West Texas Intermediate blueprint that generally determines the cost of U.S. and Canadian fuel. Keystone XL advocates argue that the pipeline's influx of Canadian oil sands crude supply would send a favorable signal to oil markets by eliminating the current gap between Texas and the European price scale known as Brent (Greenwire, Jan. 31).

"You know how you drive a stake in heart of speculators?" Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) said yesterday, referring to Democrats' frequent condemnation of Wall Street futures traders as driving global oil prices higher. "You flood the market with commodity product. ... Those who've taken big positions now will lose their shirt."

Independent energy analyst Robert McNally, a former adviser to the George W. Bush administration, offered little balm to either party yesterday as he predicted even more lurches in global oil prices thanks to a diminished role for OPEC.

The once-mighty oil cartel's ability to affect prices is increasingly ebbing thanks to a loss of its capacity cushion, McNally said, adding that "ironically, Western governments and investors will miss OPEC, or at least the relative price stability OPEC tried to provide."

McNally did embrace a broadly held GOP position by arguing against a sale of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a strategy that the White House notably declines to rule out and Republicans are pre-emptively blasting in a bid to undercut any benefit to President Obama (Greenwire, Feb. 6).

While House members of both parties doubled down on their long-standing prescriptions to alleviate consumers' agitation at gas prices, a senior Democratic senator delivered a data-laden response to his Republican colleagues who have mounted a campaign of floor speeches hitting Obama on oil production.

"We need to recognize that the key issue very clearly is not lack of access to federally owned oil and gas resources," Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico said in a floor speech that warned against "[sacrificing] science or balanced protection of" public lands to further boost U.S. oil production.

Bingaman employed multiple charts in a bid to puncture GOP and oil industry laments that the president is falsely claiming credit for a domestic fuel boom when production on federal lands fell last year (Greenwire, Feb. 27).

"The long-term solution to the challenge of high and volatile oil prices is to continue to reduce our dependence on oil, period," said the New Mexican, who is set to step down from Congress at year's end.