By Khary Cauthen
Already this month, the U.S. Senate has done more voting than it did in all of 2014. With Thursday’s session running to midnight, it’s great to see the Senate moving closer to passing a bipartisan bill to approve building the Keystone XL pipeline, which would create well-paying construction jobs here in the U.S.
President Obama should rethink his veto threat while the Senate considers final amendments to the bill. During his State of the Union speech, he spoke about entering his final lap in public office and how he wanted to make American lives better. He can make 42,000 lives better by putting them to work building KXL. The pipeline would be a direct shot in the arm for the labor industry, which backed Obama’s bid for the White House twice. Shouldn’t the president work for those who helped him get a job?
The U.S. State Department concluded that this project is good for our economy and energy security, and that it would have no significant impact on the environment, climate or otherwise. Not to mention that it would supply U.S. refineries with as much as 4 million barrels of North American oil per day from the Bakken region. The president’s own interagency process reviewing Keystone is at an end. It’s time to move forward to build this project and leave the more than six years of partisan Keystone rhetoric behind.
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