No Need to Protect the President on Keystone XL

A little late, but here is an analysis of the votes for the Keystone XL pipeline bill in both houses of Congress. DW-NOMINATE, shown in the linked graph, is the standard way of measuring ideology in modern studies of Congress. The Y-axis used to measure views on race, and now maybe taps region (but we don’t really know). The X-axis is the main ideological axis — negative numbers are more liberal, positive numbers more conservative, usually capped at -1/+1. As that post points out, the model accurately predicted that moderate Democrats would oppose the legislation, which is largely what we saw.

The bigger point, to me, is that there was no reason to protect the President on this issue, and Democrats didn’t protect him. The Senate needs 67 votes to override a veto, and the House needs 290. S.1, the Keystone XL construction bill, got 62 and 270 respectively — meaning five more votes were needed in the Senate and 20 more in the House (Sen. Rubio (R-FL) was absent from the original Senate vote, so the real number there is four).

Looking at the Senate roll call vote, it’s very unlikely any of the no votes would flip to override the President, since they’re all Democrats or caucus with Democrats. The same is true in the House, with the vote already having about as many Democratic ayes as it’s likely to get, and most of the non-votes being Democratic as well.

All of this is to say that members of Congress were free to vote whatever position best served them — which is what we saw — because nothing was actually at stake policy-wise. Several Democrats voted to build the pipeline because it served their electoral incentives, knowing full well the bill had little chance of becoming law with the President ready to veto it. It didn’t much matter whether they personally supported the policy (though some probably did) — if voting against the pipeline could hurt them, they could vote for it and largely neutralize the issue, which also helped members in swing districts distance themselves from the President.

Long story short: the President protected conservative Democrats with his veto, letting them vote however they wanted with no real consequences.