Senate Approves Keystone, Veto coming...

Senate Approves Keystone XL Pipeline Bill, Testing Obama

By CORAL DAVENPORT

The Senate passed a bill on Thursday to force approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, which President Obama is certain to veto in his first official clash with the new Republican-majority Congress.

The five-year fight over the Keystone pipeline has become a proxy for far broader fights over climate change, energy and the economy, and for the conflict between Mr. Obama and congressional Republicans.

When Republicans won control of the Senate late last year, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, chose the Keystone bill as the first measure Republicans would send to Mr. Obama.

The White House promptly said that Mr. Obama would veto the measure, which would force the approval of a proposed 1,179-mile oil pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. It would be just the third veto of Mr. Obama’s presidency, but the opening shot in a fight over Republican-sponsored measures.

The Senate voted 62 to 36 in favor of building the pipeline. Nine Democrats joined 53 Republicans in passing the bill. The passage sends the measure back to the House, which passed a largely similar bill this month. House leaders are deciding whether to pass the Senate bill as is or to hold a conference merging the House and Senate versions into a new bill to be voted on by each chamber.

Either way, the bill is expected to reach the president’s desk as soon as next week. It is unlikely, however, that either the Senate or House can muster the two-thirds majority of votes necessary to override a veto.

Mr. Obama, who currently retains authority to approve or deny the permitting of the pipeline because it crosses an international border, is expected to veto the bill because it would remove his executive authority to make the final decision. Senate Republicans said that if he vetoed the Keystone bill, they would add it on to another measure this year, like must-pass spending legislation or a broader energy bill.

But pressure is mounting on the president from both sides to make a final decision on Keystone construction, which has been pending since he took office.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly said that he is waiting for all reviews and processes to be completed before he makes a final decision. In 2013, he said that his verdict on the pipeline would be based on whether its construction would worsen climate change. But an 11-volume State Department environmental review of the proposed pipeline, released last year, concluded that its construction would not significantly increase the rate of planet-warming pollution into the atmosphere.

After that review was released, Mr. Obama said that he would not issue a decision until a court case in Nebraska over the pipeline’s route was settled. Earlier this month, the Nebraska court cleared the way for the pipeline’s construction through that state.

Mr. Obama has also said that he wants to wait until a series of reviews by additional cabinet agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the departments of Defense, Interior, Homeland Security and Commerce, are complete.

The deadline for those reviews, aimed at determining whether the project is in the national interest, is on Monday.

People on both sides of the debate are urging Mr. Obama to make a decision soon, and some people say that after the years of deliberation and delay, he could weigh in as soon as February.

Senator John Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican who is a chief sponsor of the bill, said: “You’ve got Congress approving it on a bipartisan basis. All six states on the route have approved it. The Nebraska court decision is done. The American people overwhelmingly support it. The president has to consider all that when he makes his decision.”

On that point, environmentalist opponents of the pipeline agreed. “This issue is ready for a decision,” said Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the groups that has held hundreds of rallies outside the White House and around the country, urging Mr. Obama to reject the project. “After the agencies have weighed in, this issue has been examined enough, and the president has everything he needs to make this decision.”

After all this time and deliberation, Mr. Brune expressed confidence that Mr. Obama would reject the pipeline.

“I bet your lunch he’ll reject it,” he said.

Mr. Brune said his confidence stemmed from recent public statements Mr. Obama had made that disparaged the pipeline project. In a December interview on “The Colbert Report,” Mr. Obama said he would weigh the project’s effect on climate change against its potential for the creation of jobs.

“We have to examine that, and we have to weigh that against the amount of jobs that it’s actually going to create, which aren’t a lot,” he said.

Despite the debate over the pipeline, and its potency as a symbol of energy and environmental policy, experts have pointed out repeatedly that the symbolism vastly outweighs its substance.

Still, the two-week Senate floor fight over the Keystone bill set the stage for debates on more substantial energy and climate change policy issues over the next year, and for the presidential election. Most notably, it forced Republicans into an on-the-record vote on their views on climate change: 15 Republicans voted in favor of a resolution declaring that humans contribute to climate change, and five Republicans voted in favor of a resolution declaring that humans contribute significantly to such change.

The Senate also voted in favor of an energy-efficiency amendment from Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, and Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire. The amendment, which aims to reduce energy use in commercial buildings, would go down in Mr. Obama’s veto, but the senators are expected to reintroduce it as a separate measure this year, which has a good chance of congressional and presidential approval.