Crude prices exceeded $110 a barrel in early April but now, at less than $70 a barrel on Thursday, are within a few of bucks of where they were before the bombing campaign against the terrorist regime in Tehran began. They have not fallen fast enough for the president, though, so he’s ordered the Justice Department to dig into oil companies’ business affairs. Please, Mr. President, don’t be Gavin Newsom.

“The big oil Companies are not dropping their price at the pump commensurate with the sharply lower prices they are paying for oil,” President Donald Trump announced Wednesday on social media. “Those prices are dropping like a rock! In other words, customers are being ‘gouged.’ I have instructed the DOJ to immediately start looking into this. Gasoline prices better start going down a lot faster than what I’m seeing!”

It is the job of the president to protect the country. This is why we support much of what Trump has done over the past 17 months, including his campaign against the tyrants in Iran who have been waging war against the U.S. for nearly five decades. But it is not the job of the president, nor Congress, nor any legitimate government anywhere to police prices.

Price controls and corporate probes are tools of the devilish Democrats, who always accuse the oil industry of collusion and price gouging when prices go up (but are never asked to explain themselves when prices fall).

Democrats so deeply believe in government power that they eagerly use it to hunt down the witches they believe set prices higher than what the party and most of its voters believe to be fair. There’s never any acknowledgement that they have no idea what the right price for any good or service on any given day should be. They are simply driven by their urges to control as much of life as they possibly can.

California Gov. Newsom has become the king of oil company probes, suggesting that they are nothing but parasites gleefully sucking the life from their victims. Two years ago, he released his grand “plan to prevent Big Oil ‘profit spikes,’” promising that his bold action would “save Californians money at the pump.” He groused about refiners “playing games to earn even more profits” and vowed to force them to “act responsibly.”

Newsom, of course, ignored his own role in producing the highest gasoline prices in the continental U.S. It was he who made it clear that oil refineries were not welcome in his state. It was he who signed the bill that was intended to limit “higher profits for the industry,” an act that was rewarded with Phillips 66 announcing that it was closing its Los Angeles refinery complex. The state now has 11 refineries, down from the 23 in operation 25 years ago and the 40 that were churning out finished fuel products in 1983.

California had become an energy island, unable to import gasoline from other states because of rules that outlaw every other fuel but the state’s own boutique blend, before Newsom became governor. But he’s done nothing but exacerbate the problem.

Trump needs to steer clear of Democrats’ petty, reckless tactics. The president who promised we would drill, baby, drill and pledged that the U.S. would become energy dominant needs to let the market do its job, which at this time of the year is to bump up prices to keep supplies on hand for the American driving season. Big oil is not an enemy, it is an irreplaceable provider of the energy the nation requires to keep the economy churning forward. Interrupting its operations with an investigation will squeeze Americans’ daily need to pump, baby, pump.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board