President Barack Obama would veto legislation authorizing the Keystone XL pipeline that the new Republican Congress is expected to introduced, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest reiterated Tuesday.
As Politico reported Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell plans to take up the pipeline bill as one of the first orders of business for his new GOP majority.
“This piece of legislation is not altogether different than legislation that was introduced in the last Congress,” Earnest told reporters Tuesday, “and you’ll recall that we put out a statement of administration position indicating that the president would have vetoed that bill had it passed the previous Congress.”
“I can confirm for you that if this bill passes this Congress, the president wouldn’t sign it either,” he continued.
Earnest explained that the process for determining the pipeline’s impact and route had not yet reached a “final conclusion.”
Good to know…at least for now. With the price of oil in free fall, would the backers still want to push ahead
with the project? The costs of extraction and processing just to get something that can be moved via the pipeline
are higher than many other means. Would be super karma if Congress managed to expend capital to push it past a veto, only to have the whole thing collapse because the economics don’t work.
That’s not super karma - it’s just a typical outcome for a conservative ‘solution’.
Yes but the GOP don’t need to look at the practical nature of a project. Does it benefit their benefactors is the important object.
There was an article yesterday on the website politicususa.com that said Democrats are hoping to add amendments to the Keystone bill that would make it more of a jobs bill, such as requiring that the steel, iron, etc. be American made and sourced, that significant support be granted to renewable energy projects, that the Canadian firm be prohibited from using eminent domain to acquire land needed to site the pipeline, that the oil produced not be exported but sold here domestically, that funding be restored to the energy assistance programs in the original 2009 Stimulus, with priority for seniors and veterans, and some other items that probably would not receive Republican support.
I haven’t seen this anywhere else, so can’t verify it, but here is the link: http://www.politicususa.com/2015/01/05/keystone-xl-backfires-republicans-democrats-move-turn-pipeline-real-jobs-bill.html
What I want to know is what Senate Democrats would vote to send this to the President and why?