Senate Passes Bipartisan Measure To Bar US From Selling Oil Reserves to China

The Senate on Thursday passed with bipartisan support a measure that bars the United States from selling its oil reserves to China, a move that comes one year after a Washington Free Beacon report showed the Biden administration sold nearly one million reserve barrels to a Chinese oil giant. Sens. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) introduced the policy as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. The measure received wide bipartisan backing—just 14 Democrats voted no, compared with 37 who joined their Republican colleagues in support of the ban. The amendment as a result passed 85-14, easily clearing the Senate's 60-vote threshold.

The amendment's passage in the Democratic-controlled Senate comes as a rebuke to President Joe Biden, whose administration vehemently defended its sale of 950,000 Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation. White House spokesman Ian Sams, for example, accused the sale's Republican critics of "lying" and "pushing false conspiracies about the president," an argument that did not stop a large majority of Senate Democrats from supporting a ban.