Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) said President Obama’s threat to veto a bill approving the Keystone XL oil pipeline shows he has given in to the radical left.
“The opposition to Keystone is not based on science or reason and it’s holding our country back,” Jindal said in a statement Tuesday after the White House announced that it would veto the bill.
{mosads}“It is a shame the president is bowing to the radical left and ignoring his own administration that has said the pipeline is safe.”
Jindal, who is considering running for president in 2016, said that the veto threat proves that the Obama administration “is being held hostage by the radical left.”
In preparation for the potential run, Jindal in September unveiled an energy and environment platform aimed, in part, on boosting fossil fuels and freeing them from Obama’s regulations.
Part of that strategy includes immediately approving Keystone.
“Approving this project should be a no-brainer,” Jindal said in his Tuesday statement “It’s safe and it will create thousands of jobs. Government should get out of the way of job creation.”
Though Keystone’s route avoids Louisiana and ends on Texas’s coast, Louisiana refiners stand to benefit from the new supply of oil the pipeline would bring to the region.