Senate Democrats today introduced a bill to force U.S. regulators to curb excessive Wall Street speculation in the oil futures market, blaming traders for driving gas prices up to nearly $4 a gallon.

The measure by Sens. Al Franken (D-Minn.), Ben Cardin (D-Md.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who caucuses with Democrats, would require the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to invoke its emergency powers to curb excessive oil speculation within 14 days of its passage.

"Our country is struggling to get out of a terrible Wall-Street-caused recession, and high oil prices are impacting our ability to do that," Sanders said today at a news conference.

The bill comes amid a loud partisan debate over gas prices and the cause of their recent spike. The Democrats today pointed to a growing consensus among analysts that excessive speculation by traders has contributed to the increase in gas prices.

Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs estimated that speculation is responsible for a $23.39 premium in the price of barrels of oil, or 56 cents per gallon of gas at the pump. Yesterday, the national average gas price was $3.84 a gallon.

The recent spike in gas prices is more than just a matter of supply-and-demand economics, the Democratic senators said today. The bottom line: The supply of oil has gone up while demand has gone down, and still gas prices have increased.

"From a market standpoint, we shouldn't be seeing oil prices at this level," Franken said.

The bill introduced today is identical to an amendment Franken offered earlier this week and to legislation that passed the House of Representatives by a vote of 402-19 during the gas price surge of 2008.

While many Republicans have agreed that excessive speculation has contributed to high pump prices, their leaders have pushed for opening up more of the country to domestic drilling and increasing use of Canadian oil to lessen the strain on U.S. drivers (E&ENews PM, March 6), and they are also looking to blame President Obama and Democrats for the increases. Sanders said the bill does not have any GOP support on the Senate side.

The Democratic senators said that they were open to a number of possible solutions to lower gas prices but that to ignore Wall Street speculation would be "absurd."

"President Obama is right. We need to do all of the above," Blumenthal said. "One of the above should be stopping speculation, because none of the above will work if the markets aren't working."

CFTC has fallen behind by more than a year in implementing position limits on excessive speculation that were required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The law required limits to be set in January 2011, but CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler has said it is unlikely they will be fully implemented until this fall.

According to Sanders, Gensler told the bill sponsors in a meeting last week that the commission has been delayed because of the need to coordinate with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to finalize a controversial rule that would define entities in the $300 trillion swaps market.

Gensler has also said that the commission needs more resources to fully implement all the rules in the Dodd-Frank Act. At a Senate committee hearing this afternoon, he defended an Obama administration request to increase CFTC's fiscal 2013 budget by 50 percent (E&E Daily, March 19).

Sanders was critical of the chairman at the news conference today.

"I think that Chairman Gensler doesn't understand the urgency of the moment," he said, "the pain that millions of people are feeling right now at the gas pump over high gas prices."