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Daily
Events...
Congress
plots new moves to sidestep Obama on Keystone pipeline
by Audrey
Hudson
01/20/2012
Key
Congressional leaders are determined to find a legislative end-run
around
President Barack Obama’s decision this week to kill the Keystone XL
pipeline
project.
Rep. Fred
Upton (R-MI), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, will begin
hearings next week and has asked State Department Secretary Hillary
Clinton to
testify.
House
Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) says all options are on the table including
new
legislation to make an end-run around the president to okay the $7
billion
project that would create 20,000 new jobs and boost the country’s
struggling
economy.
Republicans
will also look at legislation already moving through the approval
process to
see whether language authorizing the pipeline can be attached, Boehner
said.
“I’ll just
say this: this is not the end of the fight,” Boehner said. “Republicans
in
Congress will continue to push this because it’s good for our country
and it’s
good for our economy and it’s good for the American people, especially
for
those who are looking for work.
“President
Obama is destroying tens of thousands of American jobs and shipping
American
energy security to the Chinese,” Boehner said. “There’s no other way to
put it:
the president is selling out American jobs for politics.”
The
pipeline project was studied by the State Department for three years,
and
required a final stamp of approval from the president. Obama punted
that decision
late last year to appease his environmental base, but Republicans
forced him to
make a decision before February when they wrote the deadline into
legislation
that also extended the payroll tax cut Obama requested.
The
pipeline would have stretched 1,700 miles from Canada to Texas and
carried 1.4
million barrels of oil a day to U.S. refineries.
“The
president had a choice between jobs and politics, and he is choosing
politics,”
Upton said.
“This
pipeline has been carefully vetted, environmentally scrutinized, and
publicly
discussed for more than three years. We can’t wait any longer and the
American
people should not have to keep waiting for jobs and energy security,”
Upton
said.
“If
President Obama cannot say yes to jobs, Congress will,” Upton said.
Obama is
also getting some backlash from within this own party. Sen. Max Baucus
(D-MT)
said he will round up support in the Senate to get final approval for
the
project.
“It’s time
to move forward on the jobs and energy security our nation deserves,
and I’ll
keep fighting tooth and nail until that happens,” Baucus said.
Obama’s
move might have appeased the environmental supporters in his party, but
it
angered the labor unions that were counting on the new jobs for their
members.
The
Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA) issued a
statement
criticizing Obama’s decision, and said that “environmental groups have
used the
Keystone XL as a disingenuous proxy for arguments about global warming.”
“Once again
the President has sided with environmentalists instead of blue collar
construction workers – even though environmental concerns were more
than
adequately addressed,” said Terry O’Sullivan, president of the LIUNA. “Blue collar construction
workers across the
U.S. will not forget this.”
“The score
is job-killers, two; American workers, zero,” O’Sullivan said. “We are
completely and totally disappointed. This is politics at its worst.”
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