Keystone Pipeline

Floor Speech

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, I wish to commend the Senators who are working on the amendments on the Keystone Canadian pipeline. This is the highest priority of the new Republican majority, a pipeline that is being built on behalf of a Canadian company.

You would think there would be a lot of other possibilities here to create jobs for America, but the Senate Republicans are focused on this one. Ultimately it will produce 35 permanent jobs in America, and this is their highest priority. Had they taken up instead the Federal highway bill--a bill which is looming in terms of a deadline this year--we literally could have created thousands of American jobs across America, not just in one pipeline location. But they chose instead to help this Canadian company build this pipeline.

Sadly, it won't produce products that can help America. We had an amendment offered here on the floor that said any refined products that came from this pipeline would be sold in America. It was defeated. Every Republican voted against that amendment.

Then we offered an amendment that said this pipeline, if it is going to be built in America, should use American steel. Every Republican voted against that, save one.

The notion that we are going to use foreign steel to build a pipeline for a Canadian company so that the refined products from that pipeline can be exported overseas is somehow, in the eyes of the majority in the Senate, an American jobs bill. I don't think the American people would agree with that. They would understand, if we were taking up the Federal highway bill, that is an American jobs bill. We put construction workers across the United States to work and create an infrastructure that would build on the economy, creating more jobs in communities from Arizona to Illinois, from Florida to the State of Washington. But instead we are focused on the Keystone Canadian pipeline, the highest priority of the Senate Republican majority.

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