Leadership Quote by John Shimkus

Shimkus is doing a neat piece of political jiu-jitsu: he starts from a consensus talking point (America depends on foreign oil) and then pivots to a more indictable culprit. The “incredibly ridiculous” line isn’t just frustration; it’s a staging cue. He’s inviting listeners to feel that the real scandal isn’t geology or global markets but a self-inflicted vulnerability - the choice to import refined gasoline and diesel even after crude arrives on U.S. shores. That shift matters because it reframes “energy independence” away from drilling and toward infrastructure, regulation, and industrial capacity.

The subtext is a quiet defense of domestic refining and, by extension, the fossil fuel supply chain. By calling the situation “ridiculous,” he’s flattening the genuine complexities - refinery permitting, environmental compliance, razor-thin margins, regional fuel standards, and the fact that U.S. refineries are optimized for certain crude slates. “Just making us more dependent on the industry” is also doing double duty: it reads as anti-industry, but it’s really anti-bottleneck. The implied fix is to ease constraints so the industry can expand.

Contextually, this rhetoric fits an era when “foreign oil” was a proxy for national security anxiety, price shocks, and voter anger at the pump. Shimkus is trying to convert that anxiety into a policy appetite: build more refining capacity at home, reduce imports of finished fuels, and blame the dependency not on consumption but on the system that processes it.