“The White House played somewhat coy last week — blasting the congressional approval as an improper short-circuit of the review process currently underway at the U.S. State Department without explicitly saying that Mr. Obama would veto the bill,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

“The hedging on the Keystone issue leaves Mr. Obama’s options open. He could kick the Keystone bill back to Congress, where it’s very unlikely to clear the two-thirds vote threshold needed to override. Or he could sign it — or simply allow it to sit on his desk and become law without signing it, another option available to him — and take heat from progressives who have been loudly urging the him to ax the project.”

The New York Times reports that people “familiar with the president’s thinking say that in 2015 he might use Keystone as a bargaining chip: He would offer Republicans approval of it in exchange for approval of one of his policies.”

Jonathan Chait: “The superficial logic of a Keystone trade makes sense. Obama doesn’t really care about the project much one way or the other. He regards it as a sideshow with negligible effects on climate change. Republicans, on the other hand, constantly implore him to approve it. That would seem, on the surface, to lay the basis for a logical trade of one kind or another.”

“The trouble is, there’s little reason to think Republicans actually care about approving Keystone. Its value to them lies entirely in its use as a talking point. The pipeline is an easy, tangible example of a thing they propose to create jobs. In fact, the number of jobs the pipeline would create is pathetically negligible — around 2,000 jobs a year for two years to build it, after which maintaining the pipeline would require about 35 jobs. But the number of jobs Keystone creates is not the point. The point is that it sounds like something that creates jobs, because describing an actual tangible project makes it easy to visualize how people would be put to work on it.”