The GOP has put forward legislation to increase domestic oil and natural gas production in response to President Joe Biden’s decisions to pull from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) to stabilize skyrocketing gas prices. After several prominent Democrats submitted a request that Biden pull from the SPR, the president obliged and announced his intention to draw from the nation’s oil reserves, which are usually reserved for worst-case scenarios. The SPR began in the mid-1970s in response to a severe shortage of oil caused by an Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) embargo. Lawmakers created the reserve to ensure that such severe fuel shortages would not happen again in the future. And since then, the SPR’s supply has rarely been tapped. The U.S. government granted some of its oil reserves to Israel during the 1970s, and the SPR was also depleted after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Still, these uses remain …