Keystone Bill

Floor Speech

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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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