Congress is considering a bill that would take the decision on the pipeline out of Obama’s hands. Howie Klein expects it to go through:
It will in all likelihood pass the House tomorrow and, with the efforts of [John] Barrow [D-GA] and [Jim] Matheson [D-UT], will be hailed as a “bipartisan” bill. It will then go over to the Senate where it could very well pass as well, since so many Democrats take massive bribes from Big Oil. Perhaps Obama prefers it this way, so he doesn’t get the blame for this pollution bill.
Alan Grayson (D-FL) is challenging the constitutionality of the move:
Republican supporters of the bill have argued that Congress has the authority under the Constitution to regulate international commerce. They say the Keystone pipeline falls into that category because it would move tar sands oil between Canada and the United States. Opponents can point to recent court decisions saying that the responsibility for permitting for transnational pipelines has fallen on the president for several years. But if Grayson’s question comes up for a debate, Republicans are likely to argue that they are seeking to re-establish congressional authority over pipeline decisions — especially the Keystone pipeline, which the GOP says has been unduly delayed by Obama for several years.
Rebecca Burns explores the divisions the pipeline has caused within the Democratic party:
So far in the Keystone XL conflict, unions have largely ended up on the other side of the line in the tar sand. The Teamsters, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) and others have backed the pipeline as a way to create jobs. And as environmental groups flooded the State Department with comments opposing the pipeline, members of the AFL-CIO’s Building and Construction Trades Department (BCTD) rallied to send President Obama a different message: “We can’t wait,” said BCTD president Sean McGarvey during an April 24 demonstration calling for the State Department to approve the project. In other words, the Keystone pipeline fight has turned into an XL-sized problem for an already tenuous labor-environmental alliance. …
This isn’t the first time that greens have been painted as latte liberals removed from the issues facing ordinary people. But the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline has actually helped “redraw the cultural map” of participation in the environmental movement, according to Kim Huynh, a spokesperson with the group Tar Sands Blockade. She notes that Tar Sands Blockade, the more radical edge of the broader movement, has drawn participation from conservative landowners, Texas grandmothers and indigenous communities in staging tree-sits, lockdowns and other dramatic demonstrations to halt the ongoing construction of the pipeline’s southern leg. She believes that this has succeeded in “legitimizing direct action” in the broader environmental movement and building, for the first time, a climate change movement “with real teeth.” But do environmental activists have any hope of successfully fighting global warming without labor’s support?
The Dish 