The tar sands of Alberta.
The Senate today is debating the same bill expediting the building of the 36-inch Keystone XL pipeline that the House of Representatives
approved Friday 252-161, with 31 mostly conservative Democrats backing it. It's an end run around a process that has been established as an element of presidential authority for nearly half a century.
Ultimately, it boils down to whether Sen. Mary Landrieu—the Democratic senator who thinks she has the most to gain politically right now from this repeat effort to knuckle President Obama down on Keystone—can get the 60 votes she needs to reach the procedural threshold to keep opponents from filibustering the bill. She and Republican Sen. John Hoeven of North Dakota have been pushing the Senate Keystone XL legislation.
One of Landrieu's converts is Sen. Tom Carper:
"Senator Landrieu has been cajoling, pleading with her colleagues—mostly Democrats—to provide an up or down vote on this," Carper said in a recent interview with Bloomberg Politics. "I think the time has come."
Carper, a former Delaware governor, had opposed the project, saying he wanted "due diligence" completed. Now, he says Americans have waited long enough
So, what Carper and all the rest of the Democratic senators lined up behind Landrieu and Hoeven are telling Nebraska and the tribes is "We're driving Keystone XL on through no matter what happens in the state Supreme Court review of the route." And telling President Obama, "Mr. President, screw the process of half a century of executive orders on cross-border pipelines. We're okaying the building of this sucker."
Expectations are that the bill will collide with an Obama veto, not on the merits or demerits of the pipeline itself but over who has authority in this matter generally, the same fight over Keystone as we've already seen multiple times in Congress.
Chris Mooney at The Washington Post has a take on it you can read about below the fold.
Mooney writes:
According to University of Toledo College of Law professor Evan C. Zoldan, the Keystone bill is a piece of "special legislation"—meaning, a bill written to specifically affect the fate of a particular individual, a small group of individuals, or a company, whose name (or names) is often directly mentioned in the legal text itself. In this, Zoldan argues, the bill is similar to a controversial 2005 law passed by Congress “for the relief of the parents of Theresa Marie Schiavo,” a Florida woman who had spent 15 years in a persistent vegetative state, and whose case became a matter of national attention after her husband and her parents split over whether or not she should be kept alive on a feeding tube. [...]
And just as that bill did not apply to any other person in a persistent vegetative state, so the Keystone XL bill will not let any other pipelines that cross international borders bypass the State Department's permitting process. [...]
"What this bill will do, if it ends up being enacted," says Zoldan, "is take the fact-finding process … away from an executive agency, and say that it’s automatically deemed to be in compliance with the law." This may be one reason why a spokesman for Democratic Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware recently said the senator would opposes the bill because "it’s not Congress’s job to issue construction permits."
Zoldan has written a paper (available
here) explaining what he thinks is wrong with special legislation like this.
The balance of executive and legislative authority is a discussion worth having. But attempting to override executive authority for special legislation benefiting a foreign corporation and a select few Americans is a rotten test.
As we know, it's predicated in the case of most Republicans on the view that Obama has usurped congressional prerogatives in a number of areas. It never seemed to bother them when Republican presidents were accreting more executive branch authority. They reveled in it. They didn't mind when President G.W. Bush updated the 1968 executive order regarding authority over evaluating whether cross-border pipelines and tunnels are in the national interest.
Democrats who vote for a short-circuiting of this established process, whether in hopes of boosting Landrieu's chances in the run-off for her Senate seat—or for some other twisted idea that this legislation is in any way good for the nation—are making a huge mistake. Not just with regard to undermining long-established procedure in such matters but in delaying action that must be taken on climate change, something extraction of the tar sands will exacerbate and the pipeline will abet.