The Senate-passed Keystone XL Pipeline legislation is taking its time getting to the president’s desk.
Before blasting the president’s budget proposal this morning, however, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy made it clear that the Keystone battle is only just beginning.
“Next week, we will take up the Keystone Pipeline [bill] as passed by the Senate, and send it to the president’s desk,” he said.
Congressional Republicans, for their part, are hell-bent on passing some kind of Keystone legislation in both chambers. It’s unclear, however, what good this will do.
“Our position on the Keystone legislation is well-known,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said last week, meaning that the president has little interest in signing it into law.
Still, if as expected the legislation does make it all the way to the Oval Office, the president will almost certainly feel compelled to veto it, thus derailing a project that is both enduringly popular and ostensibly green-lighted by his own State Department.
That, of course, could prove to be an irreversible mistake -- and a politically damaging one, too.