Grassley asks party for a diesel embargo, gets a split caucus, frets a Democrat might pick his successor.

…(cont) Nine hundred miles south, a different Republican was catching a different kind of pressure over the same barrel. On 21 September, Georgia's Democratic nominee for governor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, called on Governor Brian Kemp to revive the state's fuel tax suspension. Kemp suspended it — thirty days, the state gas tax, diesel included in the relief.

Set the two next to each other. Kemp's fix is the plain kind: a tax comes off, the price at the pump comes down, the relief expires on a calendar Kemp controls. Grassley's fix asks Washington to restrict where a barrel of diesel is allowed to go, betting that keeping it here brings the price down here too — a bet his own party's oil-state wing didn't take, in the same week the idea reached the floor.

And Grassley isn't only pushing a policy. He's protecting a seat. The man who says he doesn't want a Democrat governor choosing his successor is closing out his Senate career on a diesel plan his own conference split on days after he made it. Kemp gets thirty days of relief he can point to on a receipt. Grassley gets a caucus that hasn't voted, and a succession fight that hasn't started — no seat is open, no governor has to choose anyone yet. The barrel doesn't care whose name is on the bill. It just gets more expensive for somebody, in some state, while the men arguing over the mechanism argue over who keeps the seat.