WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made the following remarks on the Senate floor urging Senate Democrats to override the President’s veto of the bipartisan Keystone XL infrastructure jobs bill:

“Construction of the Keystone Pipeline would pump billions into our economy. It would support thousands of jobs. And a bipartisan majority in both the House and Senate voted to support it.

“Today, the Senate will vote to support American jobs and infrastructure again.

“It should be a no-brainer.

“For a long time, projects like Keystone basically were no-brainers. They were often approved without much controversy.

“But that was before powerful special interests and ideological extremists decided to embark on a quixotic crusade.

“The implication that building Keystone would result in some sort of apocalyptic cataclysm has always flown in the face of science. Even the assertion that Keystone would have a significant impact on global climate ignores the scientific findings of President Obama’s own State Department report; it said that the environmental impact would be minimal.

“The reality is that the energy resources in question are almost certainly coming out of the ground whether Keystone is built or not.

“The real question here is whether we’re going to allow Keystone’s energy to help support middle-class jobs in America, or whether we’ll allow those jobs and energy to potentially be sent to high-polluting countries like China.

“Deep-pocketed leftists and extremists appear to prefer the latter option.

“By vetoing the bipartisan Keystone jobs bill, President Obama sided with these moneyed special interests over the Middle Class.

“It’s still unclear why.

“It can’t be about protecting the climate, because vetoing this bipartisan bill would hardly have an effect.

“It can’t be about protecting a broken review process the President himself broke long ago, because this bipartisan bill seeks to fix it.

“And it can’t be about giving the President more time, because he’s delayed this decision for years on end.

“Here’s the only serious explanation I can think of: President Obama is signaling to extreme special interests that his party is turning away from workers, and toward them.

“We’ve seen how the President’s veto has outraged some in the labor union community. I know it makes some of our Democratic colleagues uncomfortable too.

“I suspect that includes Democrats who didn’t support the Senate’s initial passage of Keystone.

“I suspect it also includes Democrats who might otherwise support their leadership’s unprecedented filibuster of a veto override motion.

“I’m urging every Democrat who still believes their party should be about workers, not these deep-pocketed special interests and extremists, to join us.

“Vote for cloture. Vote to override.

“Keystone’s bipartisan coalition in the Senate is only a few votes shy of from the two-thirds majority we’d need to override this partisan veto and bring Keystone’s jobs here to America.

“And it’s not too late stop your party from venturing down a path even further afield from the interests of American workers and the Middle Class.

“So join us.

“Together, let’s support Keystone’s American jobs and infrastructure.”