Senate Republicans are working to drum up enough support to override President Obama’s threatened veto of legislation to build the Keystone XL pipeline, which the House is expected to approve Wednesday.
Neither chamber last month passed the legislation with enough support to trump a veto, which the Obama administration threatened. Republicans still hope the president will sign the bill. If not, they have 63 supporters in the Senate, with nine Democrats crossing the aisle. But finding four more will be challenging.
“The next best option is to find four more Democrats who will vote for Keystone,” Sen. Roy Blunt, a member of GOP leadership, told the Washington Examiner. When asked whether Republicans had identified four such Democrats, the Missouri Republican said, “No. No.”
Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin said he was confident Obama would reject any legislation that would authorize Keystone XL and that Democrats had the numbers to reinforce a veto.
“I think we have 34 stalwarts who will sustain this veto,” the Illinois Democrat said in a recent interview. “This president seems resolute on this issue. I don’t think they can sneak up on him.”
But a Senate GOP aide told the Examiner that some Democrats might come across with concessions, though the aide didn’t detail whether that meant putting conditions on Keystone XL or trading another policy favored by Obama and Democrats.
“We have cards to play,” the aide said.
Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., the lead sponsor of the bill to approve the 1,700-mile pipeline, has said he envisions wrapping the legislation into a broader energy or spending bill that Obama might sign.
One vehicle could be the comprehensive energy package planned by Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairwoman Lisa Murkowski, which will touch on infrastructure issues such as pipelines. But Murkowski wants the bill to get signed, and Keystone XL could jeopardize those prospects.
Asked whether she would accept the pipeline as part of her planned bill, the Alaska Republican said, “The preferred alternative would be that the president would join us in the bipartisan support that this measure has received.”
Murkowski said she didn’t think waging a Keystone XL battle through a spending bill was appropriate, given it could lead to a government shutdown. Asked whether Senate Republicans were willing to take that risk, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., the No. 3 Republican in leadership, said, “Well, eh, I just think we want to get Keystone passed.”
A Democratic strategist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it was highly unlikely that either party or the administration would risk a government shutdown over Keystone XL. But the strategist didn’t rule out Obama signing some sort of compromise legislation to build Keystone XL, which has been under federal review for a cross-border permit for more than six years.
“I think it’s possible the president would negotiate away Keystone in a bigger bill to achieve some big parts of his budget. He shut down Arctic drilling one week — and then allows offshore oil drilling in the Southeast the next week,” the strategist said, referring to a decision last month to protect 12 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge but call for opening the Atlantic Ocean to drilling.
The Keystone XL decision soon will fall squarely on the White House, leaving Obama without his defense that he won’t sign legislation because the federal review isn’t completed. Interagency comments were filed last week and a determination of whether the Canada-to-Texas project is in the national interest should be coming soon from the State Department.
“How soon is the president going to act after that? So as we delay here, as we get kind of non-decisions here, the question is, the path forward — we’re almost parallel now with the president,” Keystone XL supporter Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., said last month when the upper chamber was debating the bill.
Given the timeline, Jim Manley, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., said a deal was possible if concessions were made to Democrats.
“I’ve got five bucks on that, but not more than five bucks,” said Manley, who is senior director at Quinn Gillespie and Associates. “But I don’t believe Republicans are interested actually in the pipeline. They just want it as a political issue.”
Republicans have said that Obama’s delay on the $8 billion pipeline has kept in limbo the 42,100 direct and indirect jobs the State Department said it would create during its two-year construction phase.
“I mean, this is what this is about — making the president make decisions that are important to the country. And he’s going to have to decide between jobs and the economy for the American people or if he is going to continue to be beholden to the environmental extremists and many of his funders,” Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., a member of Senate GOP leadership, told the Examiner.
“He’s offered eight veto threats. He can offer 10, he can offer 20. He can have all the fun he wants. The bottom line is we’re going to put bills on his desk that are bipartisan pieces of legislation that he’s going to have to decide.”
