President Obama vetoed the Keystone XL pipeline legislation Tuesday within hours of its arrival on his desk. Few bills have arrived with such fanfare and died so quickly.
Despite the legislation’s demise, the third veto of Obama’s presidency exposed his new political reality — unified Republican control of Congress that will force him to confront critics directly in a way he’s rarely had to before and explain his stands to the American public.
Rep. Steve Israel (D-N.Y.) said the White House and congressional Democrats are navigating “fairly new territory” in which they must convey why the president is invoking this power more often.
“You don’t want him to be the president of no. You do want him to be the president of the middle class,” Israel said in a phone interview. “Every veto is a reminder to the American people that he’s sticking up for them, while the Republicans are trying to stick it to them.”
For six years, Obama was relatively shielded by Sen. Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), who as majority leader stymied many of the GOP’s most prized proposals and allowed Obama to issue fewer vetoes than any president since Millard Fillmore (with the exception of James Garfield, who was assassinated shortly after taking office). But now that Reid’s protection is largely gone, Obama will have to resort to vetoes more often, casting his differences with congressional Republicans into sharper relief.
The latest fight was still largely over process. In his veto message, Obama said the legislation “cuts short thorough consideration” of the six-year-old pipeline permit application before the State Department completes its review.
Obama said Congress was attempting “to circumvent longstanding and proven processes for determining whether or not building . . . a cross-border pipeline serves the national interest.” The State Department said it is still considering the project, adding that there is no timetable for a decision.
But the Keystone XL measure — the first bill approved by the Republican-controlled Senate — also provided a tangible example of how things would be different with a Republican in the White House after 2016. It gathered enough Democratic votes to prevent a filibuster, and with a Republican in the White House the bill would have become law.
Instead, the bill remained a political symbol. Republicans said the veto proved the president is more interested in catering to his political base than delivering concrete results. They stressed, as they have before, lost construction jobs while glossing over the small number of direct long-term jobs — just 35 — that the pipeline would create.
“The president not only vetoed bipartisan legislation today to finish building the Keystone pipeline, but he also denied Americans thousands of new, well-paying jobs and the opportunity to progress towards energy independence,” said Senate Environment Committee Chairman James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.).
Some centrist Democrats who back the pipeline, such as Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.), also questioned Obama’s action. “The already six-year-long process on the Keystone XL pipeline is broken,” Heitkamp said.
Heitkamp, who helped rally 10 Democrats to vote for a pipeline measure last year, said that “watching bipartisan legislation come to a halt in one swift veto can be frustrating.”
Brandishing a veto — as Obama has done often in the past two months — does not come easily to a president who prefers greater comity. Early on in his presidency, he threatened vetoes only to block congressional earmarks.
“Cut the waste. Save taxpayer dollars. Support the troops,” Obama told the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in August 2009. “And if Congress sends me a defense bill loaded with a bunch of pork, I will veto it.”
Obama showed “a genuine reluctance” to use a veto before, according to Princeton University professor Julian E. Zelizer, partly because he was elected on the grounds that he could forge a new political consensus. Even when that goal became elusive, Zelizer added, the president and his aides were aware that any veto gives the GOP fodder to “rally Republicans, and even some moderate Democrats, to be against him.”
“I think he’s changed,” Zelizer said. “He’s just adjusted to this being the only tool he has left.”
Pipeline foes were elated. Environmentalists — as well as some landowners along the Keystone XL route — have lobbied hard against the pipeline, arguing that the bitumen extracted in Canada’s oil sands and shipped through the roughly 1,700-mile pipeline would accelerate global warming and endanger local waterways.
“President Obama has taken a stand for America’s wildlife, clean water and stable climate against a polluting project that threatens wildlife every step of the way, from caribou to waterfowl to endangered whooping cranes,” Collin O’Mara, president and chief executive of the National Wildlife Federation, said in a statement.
White House spokesman Eric Schultz emphasized Tuesday that the president was still open to collaboration. “There are areas where we will disagree with what Congress is doing, but we don’t think that should preclude us from working on areas where there is common ground,” he said.
Republicans were skeptical. “When the president disagrees or legislation doesn’t align with his political agenda, he doesn’t suggest changes, he doesn’t work together to compromise. He simply threatens to veto. That isn’t leadership, it’s avoidance behavior,” said Rep. Peter J. Roskam (R-Ill.), who knew the president before either was in Congress. “The Barack Obama I served with in the Illinois state Senate was someone you could work with.”
juliet.eilperin@washpost.com
steven.mufson@washpost.com
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
Juliet Eilperin is The Washington Post's White House bureau chief, covering domestic and foreign policy as well as the culture of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She is the author of two books—one on sharks, and another on Congress, not to be confused with each other—and has worked for the Post since 1998.
Steven Mufson covers the White House. Since joining The Post, he has covered economics, China, foreign policy and energy.
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