Mary Landrieu is desperate to save her seat in the U.S. Senate. It looks like she's going to lose it in next month's runoff against Congressman Bill Cassidy. And we know for a fact that Harry Reid won't be Senate Majority Leader anymore after January 1 - a fact for which we thank God daily.
So how's it going to go when the desperate senator goes to the already-rejected Majority Leader for help? If you guessed that no one's going to get anything positive out of it, you'd guess right.
Reid agreed to schedule a vote on the Keystone XL pipeline, a bill suddenly championed by Landrieu in the hope she could convinced gullible Louisiana voters that she suddenly supports infrastructure to transport oil from Canada and North Dakota to the Gulf Coast. The bill passed the House overwhelmingly, but last night it failed in the Senate. Now "failure" in the Harry Reid-controlled Senate is an interesting thing. The bill got 59 votes in favor compared with only 41 opposed. But these days it's simply assumed that those opposed to any bill will filibuster it, so it takes 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate.
Guess who could have provided the 60th vote in favor, but didn't. Yep. Harry Reid. Senator Landrieu, you just experienced what the rest of America has been dealing with for the past eight years. You got screwed by a despicable little man from Nevada. Of course, the rest of us didn't vote to make him the majority leader of the U.S. Senate. You did. So screw you.
So here's what's really funny about this phony gambit. You know who sponsored the House bill? Bill Cassidy. You know what would have put the Senate vote over the top? Another Republican senator. You know who that's going to be? Bill Cassidy, part of a Senate majority that will surely take the bill up again in the new year and pass it.
Will Obama veto the bill? Probably. He doesn't care about America's energy independence. He doesn't understand the economics of Keystone. He doesn't care if he's pissing off the Canadians, who are going ahead and building a pipeline out to the Pacific while he dithers on Keystone.
And while Obama's liberal base celebrates this defeat because they've got it in their heads that Keystone XL is all about the Koch brothers or something, we continue to miss opportunities to totally re-orient world energy markets and we keep the price of oil higher than it needs to be, which helps, for example, Iran in its pursuit of nuclear weapons.
Anyway, if Mary Landrieu wanted to convince Louisiana voters that she can make Keystone XL happen, she just failed. Time for someone new.
