In his State of the Union address last week, President Barack Obama assured Congress and the American people that the economy was moving and that American businesses were beginning to restore many of the jobs lost as a result of the “Great Recession.”
Of course, the modest job growth the nation has experienced comes in spite of President Obama’s policies, not because of them. In fact, the Obama administration has been openly hostile to many ideas and proposals that would promote economic growth and create jobs. Obama’s recent rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline serves as another stark reminder to voters — especially those who are unemployed — that the president is more interested in appeasing special interest groups than putting Americans back to work.
Keystone XL is a proposed 1,700-mile-long pipeline that would send some 700,000 barrels of bitumen per day from Canada to Texas. According to the Heritage Foundation, the pipeline would create “20,000 truly shovel-ready jobs — and 179,000 American jobs by 2035.”
Understanding the need for jobs and investment, congressional Republicans pushed the administration hard to approve the project. Obama rejected the proposal because of what he called a “rushed and arbitrary deadline,” claiming the State Department needed more time to review the proposal.
More time? The pipeline project, which has bipartisan support, already has been on the table since 2008! And the “State Department” needs to study it? Is the president serious? Does he even know what the State Department does? It is filled with bureaucrats and diplomats — and they’re qualified to “study” a major pipeline project? Besides, the environmental aspects of the proposed pipeline project already have been studied in great detail — including by the State Department — and found to have only “limited adverse impact.”
Even the editorial board of The Washington Post found Obama’s decision to indefinitely delay the Keystone project to be meritless and counterproductive. The board noted that “[w]ithout the pipeline, Canada would still export its bitumen — with long-term trends in the global market, it’s far too valuable to keep in the ground — but it would go to China.”
Of course, the real issue for President Obama was not jobs or energy independence. This is about pleasing one of his core consistencies: environmental extremists irrationally opposed to this or any meaningful projects that would tap into our own energy resources.
Unfortunately, in the rarefied world in which the environmental extremists operate — and into which Obama, for political reasons, has again chosen to place himself — the expressions “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face” and being “hoisted on one’s own petard” have no relevancy.
Bob Barr represented Georgia’s Seventh District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 2003. He provides regular commentary to Daily Caller readers.