Sen. Mary Landrieu’s bid to pass a Keystone XL pipeline bill fell short by the slimmest of margins Tuesday, leaving the $8 billion pipeline still on the table for the ascendant Republican Party to push the project to President Barack Obama’s desk in January.
The 59-41 Senate vote was just shy of the 60 votes needed to pass the bill, following a dramatic six days of whipping by the embattled Louisiana Democrat on an issue that almost all of Washington had expected to sit idle until next year.
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The defeat deals a blow to Landrieu’s campaign ahead of her Dec. 6 runoff against GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy, whom polls show running comfortably ahead. Winning on Keystone would have helped her demonstrate her clout on the Hill as a champion of her state’s influential oil and gas industry.
(Also on POLITICO: Beyond Senate defeat, ill omens for Keystone)
Cassidy’s campaign quickly knocked Landrieu, saying in a statement that her “supposed ‘clout’” never actually existed.
For her part, Landrieu didn’t point the finger at her fellow Democrats or the White House for the bill’s failure. “There’s no blame,” Landrieu told reporters. “There’s only joy in the fight.”
Just minutes after the vote, Senate Republicans vowed to bring the issue back to the chamber.
“This will be an early item on the agenda of the next Congress,” incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters.
Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.), the leading Senate Republican supporter of the pipeline, said Republicans would try to build a veto-proof 67 votes for the bill, attach it to broader energy legislation or tie it to a must-pass measure such as an appropriations bill.
(Also on POLITICO: The greening of Barack Obama)
Hoeven was met by Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), another strong Keystone supporter, as he left the Senate floor. “We’ll get it in January,” Barrasso said as he shook Hoeven’s hand. “We’ll get it in January.”
The bill’s failure left a bad taste in the mouth of centrist Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.), who had urged his colleagues in a closed door meeting to support it.
“This was ridiculous for us to [get] 59, one short. It really was uncalled for,” he said. “And those were some passionate conversations that we had in there. They were respectful and they were very passionate that we had in the caucus, and I would have thought it would have changed [the vote].”
Landrieu faced a noisy, well-organized environmental movement that made it personal against her from the start. About two-dozen greens protested outside her Washington home on Monday with a makeshift pipeline and pushed her colleagues into abandoning her all week long, until Landrieu’s path to victory appeared to come down to one of the Senate’s most liberal members, Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) — though he voted no in the end.
Tiernan Sittenfeld, the League of Conservation Voters’ senior VP for government affairs, hailed the pipeline’s latest setback. “Looking ahead, we are more confident than ever that this pipeline is never going to be built,” she said.
Obama and his aides had spent much of the week signaling he would reject the legislation, though the White House’s refusal to issue a formal veto message gave pipeline backers reason to hope that the president might move in their direction. Press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday that Obama “doesn’t support” the bill, which would approve the $8 billion pipeline without waiting for the State Department to finish its review of the project, but added that the White House would “probably wait and see what happens in the Senate.”
The pipeline would carry heavy crude oil from western Canada’s carbon-rich tar sands to the Texas Gulf Coast, pitting supporters’ hopes for North American energy independence against greens’ warnings that it would unleash calamitous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The State Department has been studying the project in fits and starts for six years.
Many on Capitol Hill say it’s time for the White House to take a stand on the project once and for all.
“Well, I do think the president ought to move ahead and make a decision. The power to make that decision was entrusted to him, and I think he should exercise it,” said independent Maine Sen. Angus King, who voted against the bill.
Landrieu’s supporters have said this week’s Keystone fight is about her longstanding advocacy for the pipeline, not an attempt to save her seat. Still, the political motivations in Senate leaders’ decision to allow the vote were clear — and now the party must face the fallout from its green base, which was disgusted by the pro-pipeline move from Democrats they spent more than $80 million to help during the midterm elections.
The oil industry and Keystone backers on both sides of the aisle will now look to next year’s Republican Congress, whose leaders have promised to make the pipeline one of its first orders of business. The GOP is all but guaranteed to have enough pro-Keystone votes to force Obama to weigh in on the pipeline in 2015.
TransCanada, the company seeking to build the pipeline, said it saw the vote as a sign that political support was growing.
“We have also seen this in new public opinion polls with two-thirds of Americans calling for the project’s approval,” TransCanada CEO Russ Girling said in a statement. “Senators Mary Landrieu and John Hoeven are to be commended for leading a bipartisan coalition in support of a legislative solution to the protracted regulatory process Keystone XL has languished in for six years.”
Darren Goode and Andrew Restuccia contributed to this story.
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