Elise Stefanik, Claudia Tenney and Brandon Williams (who will be referred to in all future posts as "the Upstate Idiots") all signed on to a bill that they have absolutely no intention of seeing made into law. The bill was written purely for propaganda purposes, and the oil companies that sponsor all three of these politicians would be deeply angered if this bill were ever actually passed. The legislation bars the Secretary of Energy from selling stocks from the National Strategic Oil Reserve for the purpose of selling barrels of oil to any company that may end up shipping that oil to refineries in China.
The problem with this bill is that it's completely unenforceable. When supplies of oil are sold from the national strategic oil reserve, sometimes oil is sold directly to a refiner, and some times it's sold to a re-seller who will sell that oil to a refining company. The nature of this legislation is such that it would require the Federal Government to track the location of every barrel of oil delivered, for an indeterminate period of time. This is especially difficult when oil is a commodity product, and tracking could only be done through the addition of chemical "colorants" that would have to be formulated by the government, and which would require chemical testing to identify. Another problem with this legislation is that the ten largest oil companies in the world have facilities all over the world, and if a company like Aramco (owned by the Saudi Arabian government and a major donor to Republican Super-PACs) was to send petroleum from the US to China, the Federal Government has no practical way of knowing that. Two of the world's largest oil companies are based in China, but those two companies (China petroleum and chemical and PetroChina) are not named in the legislation. Not only that, but given the conservative tilt of today's Supreme Court, any company that was told they couldn't re-sell oil from US reserves to refineries owned by one of those two Chinese firms could sue in US Federal Court that such a stipulation violates the US Constitution's Freedom of Association clause and also violates traditional Common Law principles of private property rights, and they would win in court.
Ultimately this bill is political theater that creates an extremely difficult to enforce standard, and creates a law that the Federal Government would be required to defend in court, even though there's no way that today's heavily conservative Supreme Court would ever side with the government against oil company arguments about Freedom of Association and private property rights. This law is pure Republican bullshit.
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