Partisan tensions over the Keystone XL pipeline today hit another high in the House, as Democrats offered a bill aimed at forcing the GOP to acknowledge that some of the oil the pipeline would carry is bound for export and a senior Republican charged Obama administration officials with blocking for his opponents.

Sharp elbows were thrown in the first minutes of today's Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on Republican legislation that would block President Obama's rejection of a permit for the pipeline, allowing construction to begin immediately on the $7 billion project set to ship 700,000-plus barrels of Canadian oil sands crude. Five Democrats proposed to require that the fuel carried in Keystone XL would remain in the United States unless the president deems otherwise -- a bid to embarrass Republicans who bill the oil link as a way to bring down prices at the pump.

"You can't sneak a 1,700-mile pipeline past the American people, and you shouldn't be able to sneak the oil out of the United States either," Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement on the new bill he co-authored with Rep. Henry Waxman of California, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee.

Practically, such conditions on a project funded by private-sector money from Alberta-based TransCanada Corp. could prove impossible to implement. But the bill gave Waxman, Markey and other liberals some firepower behind their growing challenges to the GOP claim that building the XL line would guarantee cheaper gas (Greenwire, Jan. 31).

Republicans, for their part, did not let the politically volatile claims by Democrats go unanswered. When Margaret Gaffney-Smith, chief of the Army Corps of Engineers' regulatory program, and Bureau of Land Management Deputy Director Mike Pool avowed that a GOP plan to fast-track the pipeline would effectively give sole authority over Keystone XL to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission -- leaving their agencies unable to oversee its construction -- the author of that bill pushed back.

The Army Corps and BLM did not return Republican requests to testify at a hearing last week on Keystone XL, Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) told the duo, "yet when Henry Waxman asks [you] to testify in opposition, you're here loaded for bear." Soon afterward, Terry lamented that Gaffney-Smith was a "hostile witness" and "sitting here with a great smile on your face."

Gaffney-Smith replied that she had no knowledge of an "official invitation" to testify that House Republicans had extended to the Army Corps.

She later told lawmakers that if the Terry bill's language were changed in terms of its authorities extended to FERC, the Army Corps would be able to oversee waterways crossed by the project, in accordance with current law.

House Republicans have signaled that Terry's legislation could move forward as part of their long-term federal transportation bill, which continues to face political problems of its own (E&E Daily, Feb. 2). Attaching the pro-pipeline measure to a final deal on payroll tax cuts is also in the sights of the GOP majority, though that avenue is becoming less appetizing as lawmakers near their Feb. 29 deadline for action.

Almost lost in the back and forth between Republicans who align with oil industry support for Keystone XL and Democrats who align with environmentalist opposition to the carbon-intensive project were more conservative members of the president's party. Both Reps. John Dingell (D-Mich.) and Charles Gonzalez (D-Texas) said today that the GOP effort to override Obama's veto made it more difficult for them to continue supporting the pipeline on its merits.

"I beg you not to do this," Dingell told Republicans. "I'd urge my colleagues not to drive away members like me by moving too fast on this."

Forcing the issue through legislation would "create a wealth of litigation," he added, and "lawyers will make a bunch of money."

Click here to read a copy of the new House Democratic bill.