Congress to vote on Keystone pipeline in high-stakes challenge to Obama

Both chambers of the US Congress will vote on a bill to approve the controversial Keystone XL pipeline in the coming days, in what could amount to an immediate challenge to Barack Obama’s efforts to reduce global carbon emissions.

The decision by Democratic leaders in the Senate to schedule a vote for Tuesday next week on the Keystone legislation was taken after the party’s Louisiana senator, Mary Landrieu, spent Wednesday afternoon engaged in a high-stakes bid to force the vote.

Landrieu, a longtime critic of Obama’s energy policy, is locked in a tight re-election battle against the Republican congressman Bill Cassidy, which will be resolved in a runoff on 6 December, after neither managed to gain the 50% required for an outright victory in the midterms last week.

Less than 24 hours after Obama announced a deal with China to limit and reduce carbon emissions, Landrieu took the Senate floor to call for unanimous consent for a vote on her bill to approve the pipeline.

In the end, the Senate and the House of Representatives scheduled votes to support Keystone XL, which would transport crude oil from Canada to the Gulf coast in Texas. The House vote, which will almost certainly pass, will take place on Friday.

Keystone has been a political hot potato for the Obama administration, which has repeatedly delayed a decision over approval of the pipe. It is not clear whether Obama would give the project his consent.

But renewed pressure over the pipeline, which has become a proxy in the political battle over climate change in the US, was the last thing the White House wanted on the day it announced its agreement with China, which previously had only ever pledged to reduce the rapid rate of growth in its emissions. China said on Wednesday it would cap its output by 2030, and also promised to increase its use of energy from zero-emission sources to 20% by 2030.

As part of the deal, the US also agreed double the pace of its reductions in emissions, to between 26% and 28% below 2005 levels by 2025.

Keystone’s backers argue that its construction will not increase carbon emissions, because if the project is vetoed Canadian oil would instead be transported to China. However, liberal Democrats and environmental campaigners have made Keystone a litmus test of the president’s commitment to tackling climate change.

Landrieu, renowned as a political survivor, spent Wednesday afternoon walking on and off the Senate floor, rallying support for the legislation, which she co-authored with North Dakota’s Republican senator, John Hoeven.

She repeatedly argued that the midterm results, in which Democrats were mostly defeated in key races and Republicans regained control of the Senate, were evidence that voters wanted bipartisan action.

Republicans do not take control of the Senate until January, and it had been widely expected that a vote on Keystone wait until then. But Landrieu said she wanted the issued decided immediately. “The public has clearly spoken,” she said in one of several impassioned speeches. “The bill needs to be approved today. Not in January, not in February, not in March.”

She was supported on the floor by three red-state Democrats who have long opposed Obama’s climate-change policy: Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Jon Tester of Montana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota. All of them argued the message from the midterms was that voters wanted bipartisan action on issues such as Keystone.

Landrieu, the current chair of the Senate energy committee, made her support for the energy sector a centrepiece of her re-election campaign. Her failure to get a vote on Keystone has been used by Cassidy in campaigns ads as evidence that her claimed influence in Washington was overstated.

Yet on Wednesday Landrieu’s political drive was not in doubt. Shortly after 5pm, and minutes before taking the Senate floor for the fourth time to make the formal request for the Keystone vote, she told reporters that her aim was to create jobs in her home state in Louisiana.

“This is not about credit,” she said. “It is not about glory. It is not about politics.”

A short while later, aides to both party leaders confirmed they had agreed to schedule a vote on Tuesday.

By then, Republicans had responded by tabling a vote on a parallel version of the bill, which will be held on Thursday.

The House version of the bill is co-sponsored by Cassidy, a move that would enable him to tell voters he was also responsible for any congressional approval.

Both Louisiana politicians are essentially locked in a race to claim credit for the legislation passing in their respective chambers, the result of which could be a bill approving the pipeline landing on Obama’s desk within a week.

Landrieu conceded she did not have a commitment of support from Obama, whose consent is required for the pipeline to be built. “I do not know,” she replied when asked if Obama would approve the legislation. “I do not have a commitment.”

She also faces an uphill battle to persuade enough Democrats to back her bill. Senate rules mean she will need to secure 60 votes to win passage of the bill. “I think we got the 60 votes,” she told reporters.

Even if the vote passes in both the House and Senate, the procedure for approving Keystone is currently subject to a Start Department review which has been delayed by litigation over a portion of the pipeline in Nebraska.

The White House shows no appetite for expediting that process.

“The view of the administration is that that process should continue and that that’s the proper venue for determining whether the project should move forward,” Obama’s press secretary, Josh Earnest, told reporters travelling with the president in Burma.

“There has been other legislative proposals that have been floated to try to influence the outcome of this decision about the construction of the pipeline. The administration, as you know, has taken a dim view of these kinds of legislative proposals in the past.”