On the recordJanuary 21, 2015
I thank the Senator from North Dakota and warn him that we are getting perilously close to a Senate debate, which almost never happens. So we want to alert all the news bureaus that this might even turn into a debate on the floor of the Senate. This is Senate bill 1. It is the highest priority of the Senate Republican majority. It is their first bill in the majority. They decided their first bill would be the Keystone XL Pipeline bill. The Keystone XL Pipeline is not owned by an American company; it is owned by a Canadian company, is my understanding, TransCanada. What they are doing is shipping tar sands from Canada--at least it is proposed here-- into the United States, across the Midwest, to be refined in Texas and then turned into refined oil products, which could include, of course, gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, and other things. Yesterday we had two votes on the floor of the Senate about this pipeline and what it is going to produce, and they were interesting votes. In the first vote we said: Well, if we are going to have this pipeline come into the United States of America and bring Canadian tar sands to be refined, then whatever oil it produces, the products it produces, should be used in America to help Americans reduce the cost of gasoline, to make it cheaper for manufacturing concerns to use their products. The Republicans rejected that notion that the oil and products produced by the Keystone XL Pipeline would be used in America. They rejected that.…
