Weezing The Juice

Orange Julius begins the 2012 election year hostage-taking in earnest by playing Keystone XL Or Nothing with the next round of jobs and infrastructure legislation, including the payroll tax cut that will expire next month.

House GOP leaders are preparing to release a top Boehner priority: Legislation that would generate revenue for improving the nation’s aging infrastructure through expanding domestic energy production.

“If it’s not enacted before we take up the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act, it’ll be part of it,” Boehner said of the Keystone pipeline bill on ABC’s “This Week.”

Some Republicans also want the Keystone pipeline to be part of a final deal to extend the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits. Democratic leaders oppose its inclusion, and a Boehner spokesman said that would be decided by members of the House-Senate conference committee.

On the payroll tax, Boehner said he was “confident that we’ll be able to resolve this fairly quickly.” The tax cut and unemployment benefits expire at the end of February.

The message is clear:  Boehner and his energy company cronies will get the pipeline, or middle-class America gets a spear to the guts during an election year.  Why is the Keystone XL pipeline Orange Julius's hill to die on?  Perhaps it's because the House Speaker has substantial investments in several Canadian tar sands firms that would greatly benefit from the deal, and Boehner will directly benefit from it if it's passed.  And by doing so, he may have broken SEC rules by lying about the numbers:

It is an ethics violation for elected officials to use their political office to perform official acts on behalf of special interests, and particularly when special interests are campaign donors. There is also a serious problem when a sitting congressional representative performs official acts for personal financial profit by promoting a project the representative has a financial stake in. The problem becomes egregious when the elected official lies about a project to profit himself and campaign donors and our current Speaker of the House has taken those issues a step farther. On Thursday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) received a complaint from an environmental group with accusations that the proposed Keystone XL pipeline’s owners (TransCanada) are in violation of SEC Rule 10b(5) – Employment of Manipulative and Deceptive Practices to bolster stock prices.

The complaint sent to the SEC said TransCanada is using “false or misleading statements about the proposed Keystone XL pipeline” and that they “consistently used public statements and information it knows are false in a concerted effort to secure permitting approval of Keystone XL from the U.S. government.” The complaint continues that the fallacious information misleads investors, U.S. and Canadian officials, the media, and the public “in order to bolster its balance sheets and share price,” and who is the point-man pushing the Keystone XL pipeline with lies and misinformation? Speaker of the House John Boehner.

Republicans, including Boehner, have greatly inflated the jobs numbers that the pipeline would create.  The actual number of permanent jobs created as determined by the State Department?  Twenty.  Not twenty thousand.  Twenty.  The share price of those companies went up because the Republicans made false statements, and Boehner will profit personally if the project is approved.

You don't get much more crooked than that.

And so it begins again.