Iran's piratical closure of the Strait of Hormuz knocked roughly a fifth of global oil supply offline, and no president can wave that away. The real scandal is decades of canceled pipelines, drilling moratoriums and refinery neglect that left America exposed to exactly this kind of shock. Rewarding the party that wants energy to cost more is the surest way to keep diesel painfully high.

Cheap gasoline was never a birthright, but a subsidy extracted through wars both parties kept authorizing and an energy system they jointly refused to reform. Democrats constrained domestic production while Republicans launched another conflict that closed the Strait and sent diesel to record numbers. The true price —violence abroad, expensive groceries at home, a destabilized climate — remains constant because the same political establishment has kept the same policies for decades.