Jim Geraghty of National Review Online explores President Obama’s curious response to legislation that would approve the proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

The new Congress was not yet two hours old when the White House announced Tuesday that it would veto the first bill that lawmakers plan to send to the president’s desk: a measure authorizing the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline across the Canada–U.S. border.

If President Obama wanted to build the Keystone pipeline, it would have been built already. In fact, if he wanted it built, he probably would have issued an executive order demanding its construction by now.

Back in May 2014, President Obama was complaining that Congress wasn’t sending enough bills to his desk. “You remember Harry Truman with the do-nothing Congress? This is a less productive Congress than the do-nothing Congress. This Congress makes the do-nothing Congress look like the New Deal.” Harry Reid’s refusal to bring any House bills to the floor had a lot to do with that, of course.

So Republicans take over the Senate, and within hours Obama is issuing veto threats.

This is the president who spent the first two years of his presidency boasting about shovel-ready jobs of big-spending stimulus projects. One of this president’s most clichéd political moves is to hold campaign-style events outside of Washington touting the need for infrastructure spending. He went to Wilmington, Del., and declared, “If Washington were working the way it was supposed to, Congress would be creating jobs right now . . . jobs like these guys in the hard hats are doing right now rebuilding bridges and roads and airports and ports all across the country.”

But not pipelines, apparently. Obama genuinely seems to think that pipeline-construction work has a completely different economic impact from that of other infrastructure-construction work. …

… Keep in mind, when Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana was in her runoff, and tried to save her career with a last-ditch, all-out effort to get the Senate to pass legislation to approve construction of the pipeline, there was no veto threat. But now that there’s no vulnerable Democrat involved, the White House feels free to veto a popular, long-delayed proposal.