House Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday he thinks President Barack Obama is playing to "extremists and anarchists" in his opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline bill.
"Instead of listening to people, the president is standing with a bunch of left-fringe extremists and anarchists," Boehner said, according to
The Hill.
"The president needs to listen to the American people and say, 'Yes, let's build a Keystone pipeline!'"
The
House passed a measure last month that would allow the $8 billion project to move forward. The Senate is due to vote on it Wednesday. If it passes, Obama has threatened a veto.
The oil pipeline would stretch from Alberta, Canada, down to Steele City, Nebraska, where it would hook up with other pipelines. The project is controversial because it passes over a sensitive environmental area in Nebraska.
Proponents of the pipeline say the threat to the environment would be very low. And it would serve as a job-creating machine.
"We build pipelines all around America every single day," Boehner said. "Keystone has been reviewed and approved numerous times. Even the president's own State Department will say that it creates 42,000 new jobs."
The State Department numbers, according to The Hill, actually mean that the project would support 42,000 jobs. Thirty-five jobs would be created as a direct result of it.
Nebraska's Republican
Gov. Pete Ricketts said last month that Washington needs to approve the pipeline's construction.
"I would encourage the [Obama] administration to go ahead and approve it," Ricketts said. "We should get going on it."
After the House voted in favor of Keystone last month, Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole said Obama "has decided to cater to environmental extremists rather than the majority of Americans."
The project has endured
six years of delays thanks to a political fight in the nation's capital.
Richard Rahn, a senior fellow at the CATO Institute, told Newsmax TV last week he thinks Russian money is helping fund the opposition to Keystone.
"We've had a number of reports going on for quite a while that Russian money was finding its way in U.S. environmental groups. Now, we've got increased evidence of this," Rahn said on the "America's Forum" program.
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