As those of you who have visited this blog before know, the Keystone XL pipeline is a regular topic of commentary here (in fact, it was the subject of my 3rd ever post). Yet, I increasingly liken advances in the plot line over this project to the minor advances that seem to come to television soap operas like the Young and the Restless. Now, I have to be pretty hard up to watch the Young and the Restless, but on those rare occasions that I manage to flip past it, neither the characters or the plot seem to have changed much, even over the course of a couple of years. Every once in a while, I spy a supermarket tabloid headline that says something about a major plot shift in Y&R, but not really. Stop paying your cable bill for 6 months, then tune in again, and you'll quickly pick up the story.
Sadly, the same could be said of the Keystone XL pipeline mess. Once in a while, I see a headline that suggests progress on getting Keystone closer to being built. But, not really. A few weeks ago, a Nebraska Supreme Court decision was supposed to have broken a log-jam. Apparently not. Monday's U.S. Senate vote on a new Keystone XL measure was yet another over-hyped event that promised to do the same. U.S. Congressional midterms last fall were supposed to change everything. An historic Republican majority in the House and a new GOP majority in the Senate were supposed to generally make the last two years of the Obama's presidency miserable, and perhaps alter the dynamics of this long-delayed project. That new political landscape was to have included an early legislative shot across the White House bow in the form of Keystone XL legislation.
Nope. Monday's Senate measure failed. Hopes of advancing the plot were foiled again. Cue melodramatic music. Cue over-acted, suspenseful gazes, and overheated rhetoric all designed to foreshadow future plot advances. Roll the credits!!! Hmmm. That's strange. This episode seems a lot like the one I saw six months ago.
Meanwhile, blogs like this offer comparisons with television soap operas, newspapers cite academic research on personality as a way to interpret voting behavior on Keystone, and think-tankers look for parallels in the awkwardness President Nixon's 1970 meeting with Elvis. It's all becoming a little absurd. Even as the rout in energy prices continues, undercutting the short-run economic necessity of Keystone XL, the basic political dilemma remains the same; no payoff structure has been put on the President's desk that would motivate him to approve the project. I won't repeat what I have already written on this subject, but I will repeat my prediction that Keystone XL will still be un-built when the next president assumes office in January 2017.
For anyone who watched Obama's penultimate State of the Union Address on January 20, such a prediction isn't especially bold. For a lame-duck president whose party got its butt kicked in November, Obama was remarkably combative, self-assured, and hardly struck the kind of conciliatory posture one might have expected. Instead, Obama seems poised to continue on a path of unilateral (if at times confused) executive branch action on a range of issues while daring the GOP to stop him. Indeed, perhaps the only element of this plot to advance in recent months has been Obama's explicit (rather than implicit) willingness to break out his veto pen on any measure containing Keystone XL. Meanwhile, what should have been a simple vote on Keystone XL in the Senate has been turned into an embarrassing first defeat for the GOP in the 114th Congress.
Hence, much like the slow plot lines of day-time soap operas, the Keystone XL melodrama remains stuck where it's been for a very long time. Tune in again in six months, and my bet is we'll still be looking for screen writers to advance the script. Keystone has indeed become a melodrama, but the latest failed plot twist in the U.S. Senate has also inched it a little closer to comic farce.
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