Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee vented their fury over high gasoline prices at executives of the nation’s five largest oil companies on Wednesday, grilling the oilmen over their multimillion-dollar pay packages and warning them that Congress was intent on taking action that could include a new tax on so-called windfall profits

And the oil executives warned that government intervention might only make things worse. Instead, they called on Congress to allow more drilling and exploration for domestic oil, both in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and offshore in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

“Does it trouble any of you when you see what you are doing to us, the profits that you are taking, the costs that you are imposing on working families, small businesses, truckers, farmers?”

The executives pushed back, suggesting that Democrats in Congress were at fault for not allowing more drilling and exploration for domestic oil and insisting that global economic conditions outside their control were mostly responsible for the high prices.

These executives did a good job of making it about the policies and programs and not about their obscene profits.  I have asked this question many times…..Let us say that there was more domestic drilling, how much would that bring down the cost of gas?  If it truly is out of their hands then why are there the soaring, seemingly unstoppable high profits?