Keystone Debate Poised to Hit Senate Floor [View all]

[WilliamPitt]

A long-anticipated Senate debate over the Keystone XL oil pipeline appears imminent, with Sen. John Hoeven saying he intends to offer an amendment to the energy efficiency bill that’s next on the floor schedule.

“On Keystone, I’ll either offer our amendment or maybe the joint resolution, one of those two,” the North Dakota Republican said, adding that the bill managers on both sides of the aisle “were trying to kind of find out what were going to be offered.”

Hoeven and Sen. Mary L. Landrieu, D-La., have filed a joint resolution expressing the senses of Congress that the pipeline is in the national interests of the United states. More stringent language would require the administration to approve the controversial pipeline project.

In a release last month, a bipartisan group of senators including Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and John Thune, R-S.D., blasted further delays of the pipeline approval by the State Department and the Obama administration.

The rest: http://blogs.rollcall.com/wgdb/keystone-pipeline-debate-poised-to-hit-senate-floor/

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This is purely aimed to force a decision on the death-funnel. You have to stretch the definition of "the national interest" to include "Mary Landrieu's campaign contributors" before it will cover this thing. The case for it has been a farrago of unmitigated bullshit almost from jump -- from the job claims, to its impact on American energy prices, to the appalling lack of transparency by TransCanada, builders of the death-funnel, towards the people in places like Nebraska who would rather not have their land taken for the purpose of transporting planet-slaughtering cancer-juice. Randy Thompson, a Nebraska rancher who's been fighting this for years, is smelling a rat with this latest legislative maneuvering, and I don't blame him. But this is a clever way around local opposition right here, especially since it is "bipartisan," which, as we all know, is the magic word among the Village shaman, none of whom live anywhere near where this pipeline is going to be built.

- Charles P. Pierce

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/keystone-pipeline-bipartisan-resolution-091213