[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 3]
[Senate]
[Page 3186]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             KEYSTONE BILL

  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, construction of the Keystone Pipeline 
would pump billions into our economy, it would support thousands of 
jobs, and a bipartisan majority in both the House and Senate voted to 
support it.
  Today the Senate will vote to support American jobs and 
infrastructure one more time. It should be a no-brainer. For a long 
time, projects like Keystone basically were no-brainers. They were 
often approved without much controversy at all. But that was before 
powerful special interests and ideological extremists decided to embark 
on a quixotic crusade.
  The implication that building Keystone would result in some sort of 
apocalyptic cataclysm has always flown in the face of science. Even the 
assertion that Keystone would have significant impact on global climate 
ignores the scientific findings of President Obama's own State 
Department; it said the environmental impact would be minimal.
  The reality is that the energy resources in question are almost 
certainly going to come out of the ground whether or not Keystone is 
built. The real question here is whether we are going to allow 
Keystone's energy to help support middle-class jobs in America or 
whether we will allow those jobs and energy to potentially be sent to 
high-polluting countries such as China. Deep-pocketed leftists and 
extremists appear to prefer the latter option.
  By vetoing the bipartisan Keystone jobs bill, President Obama sided 
with those moneyed special interests over the middle class, and it is 
still unclear why. It can't be about protecting the climate because 
vetoing the bipartisan bill would hardly have an effect. It can't be 
about protecting a broken review process the President himself broke 
long ago because this bipartisan bill seeks to fix the review process. 
And it can't be about giving the President more time because he has 
delayed this decision for years on end. Here is the only serious 
explanation I can think of: President Obama is signaling to extreme 
special interests that his party is turning away from workers and 
toward them.
  We have seen how the President's veto has outraged some in the labor 
union community. I know it makes some of our Democratic colleagues 
pretty uncomfortable as well. I suspect that includes Democrats who 
didn't support the Senate's initial passage of Keystone. I suspect it 
also includes Democrats who might otherwise support their leadership's 
unprecedented filibuster of a veto-override motion.
  I am urging every Democrat who still believes their party should be 
about workers, not deep-pocketed special interests and extremists, to 
join us. Vote for cloture. Vote to override. Keystone's bipartisan 
coalition in the Senate is only a few votes shy of the two-thirds 
majority we would need to override this partisan veto and bring 
Keystone's jobs here to America. And it is not too late to stop your 
party from venturing down a path even further afield from the interests 
of American workers and the middle class. So join us. Together, let's 
support Keystone's American jobs and infrastructure.

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