Keystone XL Pipeline Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, I had some concluding thoughts about the President's State of the Union speech on Tuesday night. Much of it we have heard before. In fact, what the President laid out was largely what his agenda has been for the last 6 years. In other words, we have been there and we have done that, and it hasn't worked very well. We have had tired big government proposals. In fact, the President seems as though he has doubled down in a lot of ways on higher taxes, more redistribution, and more regulations that are out of step with what the American people, I believe, want and need.

I think what they want more than anything else, from a strictly economic point of view, is to get the economy growing again. Let's create jobs. Let the private sector actually create jobs--not government. We know government is pretty incompetent when it comes to job creation. And we now have this nagging little minor detail called the national debt where we keep borrowing money and pushing that down the road to the next generation and beyond.

It is ironic in a lot of ways because the President came to the people's House to give his State of the Union speech, which is the House of Representatives, but his speech was anything but for the people. He claimed that really his focus was on middle-class economics. I think he had been listening to the senior Senator from New York who, after this last election, gave a speech at the National Press Club and said that Democrats had made a terrible mistake leading off with the President's new term in 2009 with ObamaCare and other big government programs and they had neglected stagnant wages and the middle class. So I think the President, in a tipping of his hat to Senator Schumer and his comments post election, has essentially acknowledged that his first 6 years have failed to address the needs of the middle class. That is why he kept using the phrase ``middle-class economics'' during his speech.

But it wasn't really about the middle class. It wasn't about hard-working American taxpayers. Time and again, it seemed his most urgent priority was himself. His speech was really about him and his agenda, his pet projects, his vision for bigger government.

I would just point out that the President quite candidly admitted it was his agenda and his policies that were on the ballot on November 4. I think that sent a shudder through every incumbent who was running for reelection who happened to have voted for his big government agenda. But the point is that it was soundly rejected on November 4. You couldn't tell that from the President's tone and his cheerleading last Tuesday night. But my point is we have been there, we have done that, and it didn't work. So let's try something different.

We have felt the experience of this experiment in big government for the last 6 years. If anything, what the voters said on November 4 is enough is enough. I can't remember who originally said it, but someone said famously that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over and expecting different results. You can't try the same old tired policies over and over and actually expect a different outcome. At least to my mind, reality wasn't what was driving the President's remarks. If it was, he would have focused on the biggest concerns Americans have right now. I mentioned jobs, stagnant wages, rising costs, and issues such as health care costs.

Unfortunately, ObamaCare really backfired on a lot of middle-class workers, and it actually raised their health care costs rather than lowered them. Then there are the stagnant wages I mentioned a moment ago. But if he really cared about those issues as he should and as we do, he would be working with Congress to address those issues, and he would have given some attention to one of the first major pieces of legislation that we have taken up in the 114th Congress on a bipartisan basis.

Of course I am referring to the Keystone XL Pipeline that we are debating now, where 11 Democrats joined all of the Republicans who are present to proceed to this bill. So when I say it is bipartisan, I am not just saying it. It actually is.

Sometimes you can tell a lot from what a person doesn't say. In this case, the President spoke more than 6,000 words, and he didn't mention the word Keystone in one of them. Instead of using this opportunity when millions of Americans and people around the world were listening to the President to lay out sound reasons why he continues to oppose this jobs and infrastructure project year after year, the President merely said we should look beyond a single pipeline to meet America's infrastructure needs. We need to start somewhere, and the President won't even start by taking the first step of approving this infrastructure and job-creating project known as the Keystone XL Pipeline.

I think there is a Chinese proverb that says a trip of a thousand miles has to start with the first step. That is true here as well. It may be a single pipeline, but it is a single pipeline that his own State Department has said has the potential to support more than 40,000 jobs.

Here is what I don't get. There are 2.5 million miles of oil and gas pipelines in America today--2.5 million. What is this fixation with this roughly thousand-mile pipeline that comes from Canada down to southeast Texas where it is refined, turned into gasoline, and other refined products? Why has this become such a political football?

It is because the President and, unfortunately, some of his own party who are wed to a political base that won't allow them to do the rational, realistic, practical thing, which would be to approve this pipeline. The President tried to minimize this.

We have heard people say these are temporary jobs. My job here is temporary. The President's job is temporary. It is going to run out in a couple of years. Every job is temporary in that sense. To try to denigrate these well-paying construction jobs from welders and others--people who make $125,000, $140,000 a year in my State--and to denigrate them, to minimize them, and to say it is just a temporary job and is really not all that important is a slap in the face to the people who are hungry to find work, people who are working part time who want to work full time, people who are working for minimum wage but want to improve their standard of living and their ability to provide for their family.

Then there is this. We need to remember the percentage of Americans participating in the workforce is at a 30-year low--a 30-year low. What that means to me is that some people just simply have given up looking for work, and so they have dropped out. They have retired. They have gone on to do other things. But it is a symptom of a disease in our economy. It is not something we should be proud of. If we are actually interested in getting more Americans back in the workforce, the President would approve this pipeline.

Let me tell you about one person with whom I met last Friday in Beaumont, TX. We call it the golden triangle. It is a place where refineries are seemingly almost everywhere. It is a blue-collar community but one that is proud and contributes a lot to the Texas economy. I was in Beaumont, as I said, and we were there to mark the 1-year anniversary of the southern leg of the Keystone XL Pipeline's coming online. This is a little confusing. But this is the portion of pipeline that is already in place, and it doesn't require a transit with Presidential approval to cross from Canada into the United States.

Believe it or not, there are already 4,800 jobs that have been created and an average of 400,000 barrels of Canadian crude pumped into southeast Texas already. We are not talking about doing something that is new. We are talking about adding to what already exists by completion of this pipeline.

My point is this. If the President wants to see what the potential economic impact and the impact on jobs and on the standard of living would be for the entire Keystone XL Pipeline, all he needs to do is to look to southeast Texas--to Beaumont, TX--where the impact has been nothing but positive.

I met with the mayor of Beaumont, the county judge, other local businesses, officials, and stakeholders. The mayor and the county judge pointed out that it is the taxes they get from the economic activity caused by this pipeline--which exists and which would do nothing but be enhanced by the Keystone XL Pipeline--that helps pay the taxes that pave roads, provide health care to people who don't have access to it--who can't afford health care. It provides to pay the law enforcement. It provides all of the governmental functions, including education. This is what adds to the tax base which allows local governments, including school districts, to provide for the education of our children.

Then there is this. There is the multiplier effect of the investment by the private investment on this pipeline. It is the multiplier effect because people who earn these good wages spend the money at restaurants, buy homes, rent apartments. They buy things at retail outlets. That is the multiplier effect from this pipeline.

One person in particular I want to close with is a gentleman I met by the name of Kenneth Edwards who is a vice president with the United Association, the union of plumbers, fitters, welders, and service techs. I think Mr. Edwards would agree with me that we wouldn't necessarily see eye to eye on everything. But after being married 35 years, I don't know many married couples that agree on everything. So that is not all that unusual. It isn't a surprise that Republicans and unions haven't been on the same page on every issue. But there is an issue where we agree 100 percent, and that is the need for the President to approve the Keystone XL Pipeline after 6 long years.

Mr. Edwards speaks on behalf of many union workers nationwide who, as he put it, earn their living from a series of temporary jobs that happen to add up to a lifelong career. He told me last week he wants the President to put his famous veto pen away, to take out his approval pen, and to sign his approval of this project right away.

Speaking of temporary jobs, the President is ending his time in office. He has 2 more years left. His State of the Union Address leads me to believe he is not open to changing course and making much of a departure from the partisanship and gridlock that marked his first term and a half. But there is still time to change his mind.

With the Keystone XL Pipeline bill that a bipartisan majority of Congress will soon send his way, we are presenting him an opportunity to say that he heard the message that voters delivered on November 4. I heard the American people say we are tired of the dysfunction in Washington, DC. We actually want to see Congress and the White House work together to get things done on behalf of the American people.

It is not too late. I hope he will listen not only to people such as Kenneth Edwards and union workers across the country but to the vast majority of Americans who support this important project.

I yield the floor, and I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, the next amendment following the Cornyn amendment seeks to prohibit the use of eminent domain in the building of the Keystone XL Pipeline, but eminent domain is actually irrelevant to this bill. This is actually designed to confuse things and ultimately end up being a poison pill. I think it is accurate to say that the distinguished Senator from New Jersey is no fan of the Keystone XL Pipeline, so he wants to add this provision to the bill to make it impossible, basically, to implement.

The bill doesn't authorize or mandate the use of eminent domain to take any property; it simply approves a cross-border permit. The decision on how the property should be taken should be and will be made by the individual States in a process overseen by State courts and subject to the U.S. Constitution. My amendment simply reiterates that the standard in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution applies.

I ask all Senators to vote for the Cornyn amendment and to vote against the Menendez amendment

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