KMA Land - Young Talks Keystone and Homeland Security

News Article

By Chuck Morris

Iowa 3rd District Congressman David Young told KMA listeners Wednesday morning that he's disappointed with President Obama's veto on Tuesday of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

The first term lawmaker made his comments during an interview on KMA News.

"Well the President kept his word. He used his pen and his phone and he vetoed Keystone and I'm very disappointed about it. And I know a lot of Iowans are because when I was home last during our district work break, I heard a lot of folks asking me and encouraging me to encourage the administration to sign the Keystone Pipeline bill into law."

Young, a Republican from Van Meter, minced no words when he talked more about the President's handling of this matter.

"For six years he has dilly dallied around with this. And who knows what this company is going to do now. They've waited around. They want to get that crude to market and so they may go pipe west through Canada and ship it out on oil tankers."

Young says he now expects an attempt to gain enough support to override the veto, but admits that's a long shot.

"It's pretty slim, but I believe we need to try and do it. This is why we were sent here to do this work and to challenge the President on these things where we think he was wrong and misguided."

On another matter, Congressman Young says Americans are watching lawmakers who are working against the clock to fund the Department of Homeland Security. Funding for DHS expires at midnight on Friday.

"The House did their job. We passed full funding for the Homeland Security Department and we also made sure there was no funding that could be used for the President's executive amnesty actions that he issued last November."

Young says if funding Homeland Security wasn't bundled with provisions to fund President Obama's Executive order relating to immigration, this issue would be pretty straightforward. Now he says final days before the deadline on funding has become a political football.

"I believe we've won this because of the action of the court last week where they issued a temporary injunction. You know there are 26 states that sued the federal government over those actions. So I believe our hand is strengthened there by the action of the court. And the Senate Democrat's hands is weakened, but still they can't accept that, so they're playing politics with national security." Young continued, "They are not even allowing the bill we passed to come to a vote in the U.S. Senate. So it's up to the Senate and leader McConnell to take that up. They are trying to be creative, there are rules over there. I'm hopeful in the end we come to a resolution where we fund the Department of Homeland Security. We don't want to play politics with the national security and we also want to make sure these executive actions don't go on and the courts are helping us there."

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