Segments of 36-inch pipe await a decision on the Keystone XL that they would be a part of if it is built.
As expected, the Republican leadership couldn't attract enough Democratic votes to override President Obama's
veto of S. 1, the bill
passed Jan. 29 to approve the Keystone XL pipeline by circumventing a decades-old executive process. The override vote was 62-37. Two-thirds of those present and voting were required. Eight Democrats joined the Republicans in favor of overriding.
They were Michael Bennet of Colorado, Tom Carper of Delaware, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana and Mark Warner of Virginia. This was the same group of Democrats that voted in favor of approving the pipeline in the first place except for Joe Donnelly of Indiana, who did not vote.
Manchin said before the vote that if it did not pass, a pipeline approval amendment would be added in the future to a transportation or infrastructure bill. And Republican Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota said pipeline supporters might lose the battle today but would win the war.
Pipelines and other cross-boundary transportation projects have been a matter for executive approval since the Grant administration in the 1870s. Since 1968, decisions regarding such projects have been delegated by the president to the State Department by executive order. In 2004, President George W. Bush tweaked that executive order with one of his own.
The bill to approve Keystone XL sought to go around this process. Not for all boundary-crossing pipelines (tunnels, bridges, etc.) but just for KXL. Which says a good deal about the real intent of its backers.
Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts said opposition to it would protect the long-standing executive review process for evaluating whether the pipeline is in the "national interest."
He also said that when the president makes his decision, Keystone XL "should be rejected on its merits."
And he decried the continuing votes and debates over the pipeline, which the State Department has estimated would create 35 permanent jobs. Instead, Markey said, the Senate should be discussing extending the production tax credit that subsidizes developers of power from wind, solar and geothermal sources. These industries, he noted, are already generating tens of thousands of permanent jobs and continuing the production tax credit will help create even more.
Those renewable jobs have another big benefit besides providing a good living: They head us in the direction of keeping fossil fuels in the ground and their greenhouse gas byproducts out of the already overburdened atmosphere.