After publicly pressuring President Joe Biden to halt Russian oil imports over its invasion of Ukraine, it took Sen. Josh Hawley literally just hours to lambaste the president for doing exactly that last week and for being honest with the American people about the effect it would have on gas prices. "You can't make this up," tweet-sneered Missouri's junior senator, in reference to Biden saying bluntly of prices, "They're going to go up" in the wake of the oil-import ban.

Would Hawley have preferred that Biden lie — the way Hawley and his Republican colleagues have been lying for months about the root causes of more expensive gasoline? As predictable as this chorus of partisan heckling always was, it's still disappointing that, even now, Hawley and his cohorts can't help but put their own self-serving demagoguery above America's interest in defending democracy in Ukraine.

The pain that American consumers are feeling at the pumps is real, but Hawley and other Republicans have spun an opportunistic myth around the causes, blaming Biden's environmental policies. To call this an exaggeration doesn't do it justice. They're lying, pure and simple.

The Biden administration did scuttle the Keystone XL pipeline project, but it wouldn't have opened until 2023, so it cannot have had any impact on current prices. Ditto with the administration's failed attempt to suspend new oil and gas leases on federal land. Republicans can criticize the potential long-term economic effects of prioritizing the environment over domestic oil production, but that's not the same thing as falsely alleging, as Hawley did recently, that "the Biden administration continues to keep our energy production turned off." As Hawley presumably knows, the administration did no such thing.

The price surge is no mystery. Demand for gasoline plummeted during the pandemic, driving down prices and prompting foreign and domestic drillers to reduce production. The world was so awash in oil that producers had to lease tankers just to store it.

As society reopened, demand for gasoline soared, and production hasn't caught up. Supply and demand. This is Economics 101. The ban on Russian oil imports — which Hawley & Co. fervently (and correctly) demanded — has caused prices to nudge even higher.

These are the facts. But none of them prevented the National Republican Congressional Committee last week from releasing an ad titled "Pain at the Pump," aimed at incumbent House Democrats. In an accompanying statement, the committee declared that "blame for record-high gas prices lies solely at the feet of Joe Biden and House Democrats."

It's an unfortunate fact of politics that repeating a lie enough can often entrench it in a debate — especially when an entire political party is repeating it in lockstep. As this year's midterms approach, voters who are still open to facts should ask themselves what it says about any candidate who must resort to such a strategy.

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