Yesterday, we took note of Joe Manchin’s broadsides against Joe Biden’s energy policy, but that wasn’t the end of the White House’s woes.  Scott Johnson noticed that Interior Secretary Deb Haaland had trouble with other members of the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee as well. So did the RNC, which clipped out this question that every American could answer in a heartbeat.

Haaland, however, refuses to tell John Barrasso that she thinks gas prices are too high:

WATCH: Biden Interior Secretary Deb Haaland REFUSES to answer if gas prices are too high pic.twitter.com/NrWqGxnp7U

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 20, 2022

“I’ve been driving since I was 18,” Haaland reminisces, and then mentions gas lines while meandering around Barrasso’s question. Well, I’ve been driving since I was 16 and remember gas lines too, but more to the point, I was driving in Texas six months ago and the price of gas here was below $3 a gallon. Yesterday, I was Driving While Fifty-Nine and saw that the price was $4.21 per gallon. That is in fact TOO DAMN HIGH, as I’m sure that almost everyone else in America could immediately say in answer to Barrasso’s query.

Just in case anyone thinks this is merely anecdotal, the US Energy Information Administration shows the average gas price for all formulations at a 30-year high:

The EIA average when Biden took office was $2.464 per gallon. Today’s average is $4.591 per gallon, an increase of 86.3% in just fifteen months. If that’s not too high, then there isn’t a definition for that in Haaland’s vocabulary.

Of course, one reason why Haaland may not want to answer this is that high prices were a desired outcome of Biden’s policies. Biden campaigned on explicit promises to curtail drilling, fracking, and American production of fossil fuels. Progressives want higher prices for two reasons — to discourage the use of fossil fuels, and to make alternative energy sources more competitive. For those who pursue these progressive goals, no pump price will ever be “too high.”

That, however, raises Manchin’s question as to why we’re trying to import more oil from regimes like Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and even Iran … other than to rescue Biden’s political chestnuts from the fire he himself set. Sen. Bill Cassidy also wanted to play Stump the Secretary, and followed up on Manchin’s complaint. Cassidy asked which country does a cleaner job of production — Venezuela or the US? That’s also a no-brainer, but Haaland didn’t want to answer that either, to Cassidy’s frustration:

Q: “Is it more environmentally friendly to develop and produce oil and gas” in the U.S. or in foreign countries, like Venezuela?

Biden Interior Secretary: “I’m not an economist” pic.twitter.com/SrbsceaeO5

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 19, 2022

But is she a biologist?