Elizabeth Warren is now on a third Senate committee where
she gets to be a populist thorn in the side of her foes.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren isn't against bipartisanship. But she isn't keen on the bogus kind that Republicans are interested in. Which is subtitled: our-way-or-the-highway. As progressives have seen to their delight, the senator isn't, like too many of her Democratic colleagues, shy in expressing her views about GOP hypocrisy. This makes her third committee assignment—to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources—all the more delicious.
We got a taste of what the committee is in for Tuesday when Warren challenged Republicans over their latest in a string of bills seeking to force President Obama to approve the permit for building the northern leg of the much-disputed Keystone XL pipeline. The Obama administration has said that if that bill reaches the president's desk, his advisers will recommend a veto.
Warren said in an interview with Mass Live on Monday that she opposes the pipeline because of its harmful environmental impacts and the piddling number of jobs it would create. There are better choices for congressional action, she said:
"If this is about energy policy, Keystone is about bringing oil down to the gulf and preparing it for export. If this is about energy policy, why isn't the Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) Rob Portman (R-OH) energy efficiency bill first up?" Warren said at an editorial board meeting in Worcester on Monday. "If it's about jobs, why not the Highway Transportation Bill? Instead, the first thing up is a bill that is very divisive, that runs powerful environmental risks for this country. This tells me that with the Republican rhetoric—that they are going to find things for us to work together on their actions—don't match their words."
The Shaheen-Portman
Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act would have pushed energy efficiency in commercial, residential and federal buildings and trained workers how to service energy-efficient buildings. It would have created nearly 200,000 jobs, Shaheen said. The bill had garnered seven Democratic and seven Republican sponsors and had the support of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Chamber of Commerce. But Republicans filibustered it to death in May.
The Keystone XL legislation, the latest in a string of efforts designed to force the president to approve the pipeline, is clearly the wrong place to start if bipartisanship is the goal, according to Warren.
Democratic strategists believe there is no way Keystone XL backers can get the 67 Senate votes needed to override a veto. Only nine of the Democratic senators who supported a pipeline approval bill in November are still in the Senate and several of those would surely shy away from overriding a presidential veto.