The House GOP this week will edge closer to a high-stakes, two-track confrontation with Senate Democrats and the Obama administration with a politically popular infrastructure measure serving as the battlefield.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) announced yesterday that he will seek to override the president's veto of the Keystone XL pipeline as part of a long-term transportation bill -- if the oil link is not already advanced during bicameral payroll tax-cut talks. The move adds a second volatile issue to a typically noncontroversial infrastructure package that his chamber wants to pay for in part by expanding offshore and Alaskan drilling, which is opposed by most Democrats and the White House (see related stories).

"If [Keystone XL is] not enacted before we take up the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act, it will be part of it," Boehner said of the pipeline in an interview with ABC's "This Week," referring to the GOP's title for its drilling-and-transportation package.

Boehner's comments stand to put new pressure on his Senate counterparts to go beyond the bipartisan, middle-ground approach to the infrastructure measure taken so far by their Environment and Public Works Committee. A two-year federal transportation bill passed unanimously last year by panel Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and ranking Republican James Inhofe of Oklahoma did not include language allowing new coastal oil production and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (Greenwire, Nov. 9, 2011).

Inhofe has yet to publicly discuss his openness to considering the House's plan for funding new road, rail and bridge projects by boosting domestic drilling, a goal he has long advocated on its own. But Boxer on Thursday signaled her confidence in the bipartisan framework the environment committee has crafted, telling reporters that the House should follow the upper chamber's "model of bipartisanship" and avoid saddling the transportation package with "controversial items."

Fast-tracking Keystone XL may prove more controversial to red-state House Democrats -- who would be directly undoing a decision by President Obama in pushing the $7 billion, Canada-to-U.S. oil line -- than the offshore drilling language set to clear the House Natural Resources Committee this week.

While 33 conservative Democrats in May supported Natural Resources Chairman Doc Hastings' (R-Wash.) plan to mandate new offshore lease sales in Virginia and the Gulf of Mexico, just 10 House members of Obama's party supported a payroll tax-cut plan that would force him to make a decision on the XL line. By contrast, 47 House Democrats backed a July stand-alone bill that would have expedited the link between Alberta's oil sands and Gulf Coast refineries, a project that could nearly double U.S. imports of emissions-intensive Canadian crude.

Even if Inhofe and Senate Republicans press for a vote on Keystone XL during consideration of the infrastructure bill, the endorsement of upper-chamber Democrats who back the project on its merits is by no means guaranteed. One of those pro-pipeline Democrats, Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, said Thursday that he has not talked with the GOP about legislatively advancing the project, adding that he voted for last year's payroll tax-cut proposal "in spite of" its provision setting a deadline for Obama to rule on the XL link.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee ranking member Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) yesterday called it a "missed opportunity" for the White House to deny Keystone XL and said it is important Congress compel the administration to act, perhaps via the payroll tax cut measure. She added on Platts Energy Week that there are environmental risks to allowing Canada to pipe the fuel to its West Coast instead, where it would be shipped on single-hulled Chinese tankers to refineries that are subject to much lower environmental standards.

Current federal transportation funding expires on March 31, a full month after the deadline for lawmakers to agree on a strategy for extending payroll tax relief. That gap means that the fate of the pipeline could be resolved before Boehner's conference can move to attach it to the infrastructure bill.

No matter what bill serves as the vehicle for Republicans to wage their Keystone XL clash, some in their party question whether a legislation-free bid to spotlight the negative economic consequences of the pipeline's rejection could pay greater dividends come Election Day (E&E Daily, Jan. 27).

Reporter Phil Taylor contributed.