Senate Democrats have announced they will hold a vote on the Keystone XL pipeline bill.
1) Mary Landrieu, democratic senator (and soon-to-be ex-senator) from Louisiana has been advocating for the Keystone XL oil pipeline since construction started in 2008. While her support of the Keystone pipeline is not surprising, making this the urgent business of the lame-duck senate session is somewhat surprising. And she has wasted no time, announcing only 30 minutes after the start of the new session that she wanted the senate to hold a vote - now. In her message on the senate floor, Sen. Landrieu said “I want to say ‘yes’ to [the] majority leader—new Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The time to start is now.”
2) Whether the Keystone XL project is approved or not, Sen. Landrieu has little chance of retaining her senate seat next year. Polls show her GOP challenger Bill Cassidy is the clear favorite in the upcoming run-off election in December. Senator Landrieu hopes that successful passage of the Keystone pipeline legislation will win her votes back home, despite the fact that Cassidy, a 4-time GOP congressman and author and sponsor of the House version of the Keystone bill, has a better claim to Keystone success. To make matters worse for Landrieu, she can no longer claim her big selling point as a politician: she loses her chairperson status of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee when the GOP takes over the senate majority in January.
3) Despite Sen. Landrieu's not-long-for-the-senate status, and her apparent support for soon-to-be Majority Leader McConnell, current Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid has agreed to bring the Keystone bill to the floor for a vote - perhaps next Tuesday. His agreement for a vote appears based largely on political calculus rather than on the merits of the oil pipeline - and yet also brings many problems for Democrats and no real advantages.
4) One of the big problems for Harry Reid and the senate Democrats is that many voters, both within the Democratic Party and among Independents, do not support the Keystone XL project and see it as a gift to the wealthy that is harmful to clean air, ground-water aquifers, and large swathes of western prairie. Sen. Reid's last act as majority Leader could further the rift between the party leaders and their support among voters.
5) Last week saw President Obama triumphantly announcing a major agreement with China on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That success will be quickly overshadowed by the US congress passing legislation to produce the most wasteful and carbon-polluting petroleum known to man. The USA cannot lead the world on matters of energy and the environment while advancing the fortunes of wasteful polluters. Passage of the Keystone pipeline legislation would be a forceful thumb in the eye of the president: we expect this from Republicans, but not from the Democrats. This makes Majority Leader Reid's agreement to bring the keystone legislation for a vote all the more curious. It would not surprise me to learn the president now dislikes the Democratic Party as much as mid-term voters.
6) Of course just as the Republicans have done so often in the past, any single Democratic senator could stop the upcoming Keystone vote simply by announcing an intention to filibuster the bill, forcing the bill's sponsors to find 60 senators willing to over-ride a Democratic filibuster. Currently, Keystone supporters in the senate lack the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. It is not clear that Sen. Reid can keep all of the Democratic senators in line when the Keystone bill comes up for a vote. Watching Majority Leader Reid fight with other Democratic senators over the bill will not help the public perception of the Democratic Party as weak, fumbling, and uncertain.
7) Will any senate Democrat stand up to defend the environment and filibuster the Keystone bill? It may be that none of the senate Democrats want to make even this gesture - now largely ceremonial. Come January, the Republican gains in the senate will provide enough votes to make the Keystone legislation veto-proof.
8) Mary Landrieu gets a lot of money from the oil and gas industry to represent the views of the industry in Washington D.C. It is not at all clear what Harry Reid, or Pres. Obama, or the Democratic Party, or the American people get: more damage to the environment, exacerbation of a changing climate, a veto-showdown fight, a furthering of the alienation environmentalists and other liberals feel toward the Democratic Party. It could possibly be argued that these loses are offset by holding onto a Democratic senate seat, but at this moment all the signs say that Landrieu will be defeated. As is common in Washington these days, the corporations and wealthy individuals win and everyone else loses. It is curious to me that Sen. Reid has agreed to hold this battle at this time, given the large tactical and strategic disadvantages this fight entails. It is not only the wrong fight, it is being fought badly. The Democratic Party can only blame itself for bringing this mess down on its - and our - heads.