This is true. Via USA Today:
Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, a freshman Democrat from North Dakota, is ready to take on President Obama over the long-delayed approval for the Keystone XL Pipeline — and she predicts her side will prevail.
“We know that we have the votes here in the Senate; we certainly have the votes in the House,” she told USA TODAY on Thursday. “In fact, I think we could build enough votes to override a veto.” …
She is impatient on both fronts: for Congress to negotiate a so-called continuing resolution that is “clean,” funding the government without being tied to extraneous issues, and for the president to decide what to do about the pipeline.
“The Keystone Pipeline decision has taken longer than it took us to defeat Hitler,” she said. “There’s just something wrong with this process.”
Obama “got himself painted into the corner” by environmentalists who oppose the pipeline, she said. “He’s having a very difficult time to find a real, factual, legal reason to deny the permit.”
This isn’t the first time Sen. Heitkamp has come up with a rather colorful analogy concerning the Keystone XL pipeline, and an energy-related revolt from Democrats probably isn’t something the White House is particularly keen on dealing with right now, but Heitkamp’s home state of North Dakota has a heck of a lot to lose in both this never-ending oblivion of prohibitive uncertainty and in the event of an ultimate permit rejection.
As I mentioned in my post yesterday demythifying parts two and three of billionaire Tom Steyer’s deliberately misleading advertising campaign trying to rally opposition against the Keystone XL pipeline, Steyer in his narration keeps referring to the pending northern extension of the already-existing Keystone pipeline as a “foreign-oil pipeline” — which, if it were actually true, does not adequately explain why Democratic U.S. senators like Heidi Heitkamp (not to mention Baucus, Begich, Bennet, Carper, Casey, Coons, Donnelly, Hagan, Johnson, Landrieu, Manchin, McCaskill, Nelson, Pryor, Tester, and Warner) are ready to go to the mattresses with the leader of their party to finally get the thing built.
In reality, of course, the Keystone pipeline will transport American oil from North Dakota, Montana, and etcetera as well as Canadian oil to market — but the eco-radical crowd would rather we never really wrap our heads around that inconvenient truth.
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