Keystone XL Pipeline Act -- Veto

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, President Obama had advocated reducing our reliance on Middle Eastern oil. The President has advocated reaffirming the commitment of the United States to its close allies. The President has led us to believe he would work to create American jobs, not veto them. Of course, signing the bipartisan Keystone jobs bill would have advanced all of those priorities, but President Obama chose deep-pocketed special interests over the middle class with his partisan veto of the Keystone jobs bill. It is the kind of thing that puts union workers on edge. I suspect it makes some of our Democratic colleagues uncomfortable too.

But here is the good news: Our Democratic friends don't have to make the same choice the President made. There is a bipartisan jobs coalition right here in the Senate that would love to have their support. We are pro-Keystone jobs, we are pro-Keystone infrastructure, and we are pro-middle class.

If you are interested in jobs and infrastructure and saving your party from an extreme mistake, then join us. Vote with us to override a partisan veto and help the President pursue priorities he has advocated in the past. There is no reason to allow powerful special interests to block the billions this infrastructure project would pour into our economy or the thousands of American jobs Keystone would support. Your vote for common sense can release this special interest stranglehold. It can return a little more sanity to Washington.

There is a lot we can accomplish by working together with serious jobs ideas and commonsense reform as our guiding principle. So I hope you will join the new majority in that effort because no matter what happens today, this new Congress is not going to stop working for good ideas, and we are not going to protect the President from them either.

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