Driving is an American pastime on Memorial Day weekend. Indeed, today’s holiday is THE road trip occasion in American culture. This acute association explains why American politicians choose the lead up to Memorial Day to trot out plans to address high gasoline prices.

This year, it was dueling votes in the Senate. Roughly speaking, the Republicans tried to increase the supply of oil by ending the Obama administration’s de facto moratorium on domestic drilling, wrought by bureaucratic foot-dragging. The legislation already had been passed by the Republican-controlled House. On the other hand, the Democrats wanted to raise taxes on “Big Oil” companies, by eliminating tax breaks enjoyed by many—and in some cases, all—businesses. Neither party wooed enough votes to survive a filibuster, so they both failed. Of the two, the Republicans’ ideas were better this time, but there have been instances in the past when both parties were equally bad in the run up to Memorial Day weekend.

In May 2001, for example, President George W. Bush unveiled his administration’s much-hyped “Task Force Report on Energy.” To be sure, there were some great ideas in the unwieldy report, but there were also many awful ideas, foremost among them being the President’s proposal to waste taxpayer dollars on the FreedomCar initiative, a dead-end hydrogen fuel technology. The Task Force Report on Energy also called for a scientific report on the need for more stringent Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards. This was the first step to the President ultimately signing into law increased fuel efficiency standards in late 2007. As has been covered extensively by my colleague Sam Kazman, CAFE standards are unwarranted violations of consumer choice that have the unfortunate side-effect of killing motorists.

The last Republican President’s transportation policies were losers, but Congressional Democrats are the league leaders in stupid energy policies issued near Memorial Day. Consider their run since 2006:

2006: Senate Democrats scuttled legislation to open ANWR with a promised filibuster.

2007: House Democrats passed the cleverly titled NOPEC (No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act) bill, legislation that would somehow alter the resource acquisition decisions made by sovereign countries, among them allies. That is, the NOPEC bill was pure, unadulterated grandstanding.

2008: Senate Democrats tried to drum up drama over nefarious oil “speculators.” Like the 2007 NOPEC Act, targeting “speculators” sounds furious, but signifies nothing.

2009: House Democrats proposed a novel solution for high gas prices: higher gas prices. With the support of House leadership, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills) pushed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, a cap-and-trade energy rationing scheme designed to raise the price of hydrocarbon energy like gasoline.

2010: BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster dominated the energy policy debate for the entire summer. Funny how we don’t talk about that anymore.

With gas prices hovering near $4/gallon, Democrats are trotting out fanciful “solutions” to temper the price of oil.

On Saturday, President rolled out a three-part plan to relieve Americans’ pain at the pump. The third part was the elimination of Big Oil “subsidies” (in fact, they are tax breaks, not subsidies). This doesn’t make any sense. The point of the tax breaks to Big Oil is to decrease the cost of production. That is, they make oil cheaper to extract. Removing these “subsidies” will in no way decrease the price of gas.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats are blaming evil “speculators” for bidding up the price of oil. This is utter malarkey. The price of oil is dictated by a global market.  Ill-defined “speculators” are a straw man.

Removing Big Oil’s “subsidies” and prosecuting “speculators” are empty political gimmicks of the sort that the 2008 version of Obama campaigned against. (So much for “Change,” right?) I suspect that the President and Senate Democrats are relying on these bogus non-solutions because, otherwise, they’d have to acknowledge that the price of oil is a function of supply and demand. And if they concede that the market, and not “subsidies” or “speculators,” is to blame for high oil prices, then they’d also have to acknowledge that increasing supply would decrease the price. That is, they’d have to admit that “drill, baby, drill” works. Of course, they don’t want to do that, because doing so would upset their environmentalist base.

This is why I’m suspicious of the President’s apparent pro-drilling posture during his Saturday address. In addition to prosecuting “speculators” and removing Big Oil “subsidies,” President Obama promised to expand domestic production. Here’s what he said,

Second, we should increase safe and responsible oil production here at home.  Last year, America’s oil production reached its highest level since 2003*.  But I believe that we should expand oil production in America – even as we increase safety and environmental standards.

To do this, I am directing the Department of Interior to conduct annual lease sales in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve, while respecting sensitive areas, and to speed up the evaluation of oil and gas resources in the mid and south Atlantic.  We plan to lease new areas in the Gulf of Mexico as well, and work to create new incentives for industry to develop their unused leases both on and offshore.

*[The President is being disingenuous. Expanded oil production in America has been driven primarily by production from the huge Bakken Formation in North Dakota.  And this was made possible by the fact that the oil is underneath private land. Were the Bakken Formation on federal land, it would have been locked up by the Obama Administration.]

The absence of specifics in the President’s pro-production plan gives me pause. I’m not the only one who harbors this concern. The pro-drilling editorial board at the New Orleans Times Picayune is also waiting to see real action before it believes the President.