The Biden team seems to be doing all it can to prevent crises from blowing up — not by resolving the problems, but by putting off the explosions until after the election.

As I wrote on Tuesday, there was a report that when the Biden team got the news that OPEC+ might be considering a production cut, they pressured Saudi Arabia to ask OPEC+ to put it off for a month. That way, it wouldn’t go into effect until right before the election and the effect wouldn’t be felt by American voters until after the election. They even threatened the Saudis that our relationship with them would be harmed if the Saudis didn’t do what they said. But the Saudis said that they thought the election was the reason for it. They didn’t agree because they have their economy and interests to be concerned about. But the Biden team accused them of siding with Russia.

When questioned, the Biden team denied that they were trying to put off the cut until the effect was after the election. But we saw that the Biden team and prominent Democrats then said the relationship with Saudi Arabia needed to be reevaluated — the threat the Biden team reportedly had promised.

Now there appears to be yet another instance of “election deception” by the Biden team.

The danger of a rail strike may be looming again. There are a dozen unions involved and if any one of them has an issue, it means the strike is on. In this case, the union that’s upset now is the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees, which announced Monday that its members had voted down the deal.

The Biden team touted that they worked out a deal averting a rail strike as a “victory.”

President Biden made a “crucial call” into negotiations around 9pm and pushed the sides to a deal. Union workers will still need to ratify deal, but there’s a new “cooling off” period that will avert a strike in case they don’t. https://t.co/HXSMTfEWf6

— Kayla Tausche (@kaylatausche) September 15, 2022

But what they did get the unions to agree to involve the “election deception” of which I speak. They worked out a required “cooling off period” so even though one rejected the deal, the strike wouldn’t happen right away. Guess how long that “cooling-off period” is?

No strike will happen before the end of the so-called cooling-off period in late November — after the midterm elections — and negotiations are continuing between the freight railroad industry and a dozen unions. But one labor organization’s vote this week to reject a White House-brokered compromise is fostering new dangers of a work stoppage that would halt 40 percent of the nation’s freight traffic — imperiling Americans’ food, drinking water and electricity supplies as well as the holiday shopping season.

So they traded a strike that could hit now before the election that would hurt their chances for a possible strike hit after the election, right in the middle of the holiday season so it would hurt even more Americans.

For consumers, the result would be empty shelves and delayed shipments during the time of year they rely on them most. Passenger rail systems around the country, including many Amtrak routes, were also gearing up to shut down before negotiations prodded by the Biden administration yielded a tentative deal in mid-September.

“It is a trade union principle that if a railroad union goes on strike, other railroad unions honor that strike,” said Peter Kennedy, who directs strategic coordination and research at BMWE. And at this point, reaching a new tentative agreement seems “dubious at best.”

I called the Saudi move a “naked political deal.” Add this one right into it. If you were looking out for the best interests of everyone, including the unions, and not just your political advantage, you’d want to work out the issues as soon as possible now, so it wouldn’t hit in the holiday season.

How many other things are they doing to try to save their bacon?