The chief sponsor of a new House proposal to speed construction of the Keystone XL pipeline today said GOP leaders could attach the plan to an extension of unemployment insurance and tax cuts hotly sought by Democrats, effectively daring the president's party to oppose fast-tracking the $7 billion oil link.

Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.) told reporters that House Republican leaders affirmed the XL gambit at a conference meeting earlier today, hours before the House Energy & Commerce Committee held a hearing on his measure to shift a speedier vetting of the pipeline from the State Department to the independent Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

But after his pre-hearing press conference, Terry cautioned that a final decision on whether the Keystone XL bill would hitch a ride on one of two legislative vehicles seen as must-pass before 2012 depends on what shape that bill ultimately takes.

"I don't know if anything is set in stone about that," Terry told Greenwire, adding that "the positive thing to take from" the GOP conference meeting discussion "is that our leadership feels it's important enough to include."

The Keystone XL bill unveiled by Energy and Commerce Republicans would give FERC two 30-day windows to issue final permits for the 1,700-mile pipeline. The first window would begin as soon as XL sponsor TransCanada Corp. files an application for construction and only allow FERC to reject the project if its bid does not conform with the final environmental review State issued in August (Greenwire, Aug. 26).

The bill then gives FERC another 30-day period to sign off on a modification to the pipeline route in Nebraska, where a newly passed state law affirms a rerouting of Keystone XL that skirts the environmentally sensitive soil of the state's Sandhills region. Nebraska environmental officials have projected that their review of that new pipeline path could take six to nine months, but the bill starts its second 30-day clock without setting an upper limit on that in-state process.

Conservationists have waged a bitter battle to derail Keystone XL, which would nearly double U.S. import capacity of Canadian oil-sands crude if approved, as a spur for more air pollution and human health risks linked to the Canadian fuel. Amid that opposition, the Obama administration last month postponed a final ruling on Keystone XL until its own study of the Nebraska reroute is finished in 2013.

Republicans in both chambers decried that delay as a political ploy, allowing the president to assuage environmentalists who oppose the pipeline without rejecting it outright and dealing a blow to U.S.-Canada ties as well as relations with industry. Terry's bill, and a separate upper-chamber plan from Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) that requires a quicker environmental review from State, aim to pressure the administration over a project that nearly 50 House Democrats voted to expedite in July (E&E Daily, Nov. 30).

Yet Lugar's Keystone XL plan has yet to draw a Democratic co-sponsor. Asked why the House GOP has won a stronger pro-pipeline showing from Red State Democrats, Terry demurred. "I don't know what the disconnect is, to be blunt," he said. But he predicted several senators in President Obama's party would back the bill on the floor.

One conservative Democrat who praised the TransCanada deal to move the pipeline away from the Sandhills yesterday continued to withhold his backing for Lugar's bill.

"The issue shouldn't be about setting arbitrary deadlines as much as it should be about getting the right kind of environmental impact study," Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said, adding that legislators in his state "chose not to have a time frame" for their review of the reroute.

Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce subpanel holding today's hearing, said that the House GOP's final decision could hinge on whether potential upper-chamber Democratic support materializes. "We're running out of options here at the end" of the year, he said. "A lot of this is going to depend on the Senate, what kind of priority they set on the Keystone pipeline."

A spokesman for Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) did not return a request for comment in time for publication on legislative vehicles for the new Keystone XL bill.

Reporter Jeremy P. Jacobs contributed.