Sen. David Vitter is pushing a bill that would give President Obama – or more accurately, the Secretary of State – 60 days to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, and he talked about that bill on Larry Kudlow’s show last night as he debated Vermont Democrat Peter Welch, who as Vitter said threw up a bunch of excuses for not building the pipeline.

“We’re fighting to keep the Keystone XL pipeline project on a realistic timeline for completion,” Vitter said in introducing the bill. “This project would create approximately 20,000 new jobs, $7 billion in new investment and provide 700,000 new barrels of oil a day – oil we wouldn’t need from the Middle East. Everyone in Washington talks about saving the economy and creating jobs – this would actually do something about that.”

Vitter pointed out that the Left’s great talking point against Keystone XL, namely that the conservative Republican governor of Nebraska was worried about the pipeline’s route through that state, has been resolved thanks to TransCanada’s agreement to re-route it around the Sand Hills area the governor was concerned about.

There’s no reason not to build this thing other than that the idiots who comprise the environmental nut lobby have the president by the short-and-curlies. And if Obama doesn’t stand up to them (he won’t), TransCanada will build that pipeline to Vancouver and ship oil by sea from the tar sands to China instead of here. It’s a question whether we want to buy oil from a friendly country (Canada) who shares our values and interests or a hostile regime (Venezuela) allied with Iran which is actively fomenting socialist revolution throughout Latin America.

Vitter deserves thanks for pushing the issue, though it’s highly unlikely his bill will get anywhere given that Senate Democrats are even worse than Obama in their slavish obeisance to the environut lobby.