…and apparently there will, in fact, be sufficient votes for cloture.

The Senate is poised to vote Thursday on final passage of a bill to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, bringing the legislation one step closer to President Obama’s desk.

At least 60 senators are expected to vote to approve the pipeline.

President Obama has threatened to veto legislation authorizing the $8 billion pipeline’s construction. The legislation must first be approved by the House, which has already passed its own bill authorizing the pipeline.

It’s not clear whether the House will just approve the Senate’s version, or if there will be a conference between House and Senate members.

Our sources told us the House was going to move the Senate version as is, which is one reason Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell trampled a bunch of Democrat amendments last week and earned the wrath of his Democrat predecessor and literal punching bag Harry Reid.

But if there are 60 votes, unfortunately there aren’t 67. Which means Obama will veto, and unless McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner are willing to put Keystone XL into the federal budget and risk a government shutdown when Obama vetoes that, there is no Keystone XL pipeline coming out of the new GOP-majority Senate regardless of how big a public majority there is for it.

There is good news to report, however. A friend of ours who does governmental relations for the energy industry told us earlier in the week that the Left’s OCD-reminiscent focus on Keystone XL as a symbolic bogeyman has made them blind to lots of other energy infrastructure projects, and those have continued apace over the last couple of years without much of a fight. So while Keystone XL is a major stumbling block, the Left hasn’t been able to stop energy development as a whole in any significant respect.