GOP: "The president just drags his feet" on Keystone
Only a day after House Speaker John Boehner signed the Keystone XL bill out of Congress, Republicans renewed their calls for President Obama to make the oil pipeline a reality.
"We can secure the safest, most cost-effective way to transport these resources," Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin said in the GOP's weekly address. "And we can continue building our energy future and reducing our dependence on foreign oil."
Fallin pointed out that the TransCanada pipeline, which would transport oil from northern tar sands to refineries in the United States, has passed through intense critical examination from both public and private interests.
"Keystone has now been through more than six years of scrutiny - far more than any project of its kind - and it's passed every test and cleared every hurdle," the governor said. "But still, the president just drags his feet."
Boehner recruited the Oklahoma governor to deliver the weekly GOP address. Fallin is the chief executive of a state that would benefit greatly from approval of the pipeline plans.
The 485-mile Keystone Gulf portion, which connects Oklahoma's pipeline centers to Texas refineries, has already been approved. And according to Fallin, Keystone is expected to generate approximately $15 million in yearly tax revenue for the state.
"Out here, that's what Keystone is about. Not politics, not Republicans and Democrats. It's about jobs. It's about energy. It's about infrastructure. It's about hope," Fallin said. "President Obama was once about that too."
Sustainability groups cite public safety concerns and damage to the surrounding environment as primary reasons why the TransCanada project mustn't reach completion.
Mr. Obama has threatened to veto any bill passed through Congress that approves the Keystone XL pipeline.
In his own weekly address, Mr. Obama called for "smarter" education legislation that would peel back the contentious effects of No Child Left Behind.
The president laid out his own vision for an elementary and secondary education plan, which "addresses the overuse of standardized tests, makes a real investment in preschool and gives every kid a fair shot in the new economy."
Mr. Obama lambasted the GOP's own education reform bill, saying that rather than positively reforming education standards, the bill would "frankly do the opposite."
The Republican-backed Student Success Act passed out of a House committee Wednesday and arrived on the floor despite Democrats' objections. The proposed legislation would renew many of the policies enacted by No Child Left Behind, an act that President George W. Bush signed into law in 2002.
The president warned that the Republicans' new plan "could let states and cities shuffle education dollars into things like sports stadiums or tax cuts for the wealthy."
"Congress would actually allow states to make even deeper cuts into school districts that need the most support, send even more money to some of the wealthiest school districts in America and turn back the clock to a time when too many students were left behind in failing schools," he said.
The president took a final parting shot at Washington bureaucracy, noting that "some of these changes are hard."
"They'll require us to demand that Washington treat education reform as the dedicated progress of decades," he said. " Something a town with a short attention span doesn't always do very well."