Tourists who got up early to beat the crowds on the National Mall on April 22, 2014, might well have thought they’d stumbled onto a mirage—or a movie set. Rising out of the grassy corridor between the National Gallery and the Natural History Museum on one side, and the Smithsonian, the Air and Space Museum, and the Museum of the American Indian on the other, a dozen teepees stood silent in the morning mist. Most were the plain white canvas-and-poles of a thousand Westerns. But one, with a blue stripe circling the base showing fish and ducks swimming in clear water, and a middle section painted with a procession of buffalo, moose, caribou, wolves, and deer, bore the admonition to “Honor the Earth.” Another, with the same water/earth/sky motif—green and blue waves under a band of brightly colored horses, with a gigantic turtle gazing upward at the black night sky—also carried the inscriptions “Oyate Owicakiye Wicasa” and “Awe Kooda bilaxpak Kuuxshish,” the names given to President Barack Obama by the Lakota and the Crow nations. (The names mean “Man Who Helps the People” and “One Who Helps People throughout the Land.”) A third, striped in sand, black and red, was decorated with a bright red circle with the words “Protect and Reject” in big letters and, in smaller letters, “The Cowboy and Indian Alliance.”
As if on cue, a troop of mounted riders, about half of them bare-back or on blankets, wearing feathered headdresses, and the rest on western saddles wearing cowboy hats and boots, came riding up Independence Avenue from the Reflecting Pool into the encampment. Later that week, thousands of protesters marched—and rode—past the Capitol demanding the Obama administration block TransCanada from building the 1,200-mile-long Keystone XL pipeline. Among the crowd was a slightly built woman with a pageboy haircut, wearing a denim jacket and black jeans tucked into the top of a pair of cowboy boots. On the front of each boot a blue-gray sandhill crane takes off against a red leather sky. Her mobile phone rang, showing a White House exchange. Rohan Patel, special assistant to the president and senior advisor for climate and energy policy, was on the line. “Well, Jane,” he said, “you have our attention.”
“Can we come over and meet?” asked Jane Kleeb, head of BOLD Nebraska, and midwife to the Cowboy and Indian Alliance. Seven months later, in the Roosevelt Room, President Obama announced that the State Department had decided the “Keystone XL pipeline would not serve the national interests of the United States. I agree with that decision.”
If it wasn’t for her eating disorder, Jane Kleeb might still be a Republican. Instead, since December 2016 she’s been the chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, as well as serving on the board of Our Revolution, the political group founded to continue the legacy of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. As one of the highest-profile Sanders backers inside the Democratic Party, Kleeb herself has become a target for those with a stake in defending the party’s reliance on corporate funding—or the revolving door between Democratic policy makers and K Street lobbying firms. Her position on the Democratic National Committee’s twenty-one-member Unity Commission also puts her on the front line in battles over how the party itself should be run. Yet Kleeb sees herself primarily as an advocate for rural America—the parts that Democrats on both coasts all too often deride as “flyover country.”
“I keep hearing Democrats say, ‘We need to reach out to rural voters and working class folks.’ Number one, we’re not animals at a zoo. That’s number one. We probably care about a lot of the same things that you care about. We might talk about them in different ways. I might wear boots and you may wear Prada, but we’re still putting shoes on. We all have bathrooms. Indoors.”
I first met Kleeb in Omaha, in the spring of 2017—the middle of a long season of heartbreaking losses for Democrats, especially in red states like Nebraska. Up on stage in front of six thousand people at the Baxter Arena she seemed tiny, and frail, beginning her speech, as she often does, by describing her own long struggle with anorexia. Afterward, I asked her why she did that.
“Because I’m an organizer. For me, telling stories is how you connect with people. And how you really show folks that our political leaders don’t have to be some magical people picked out of the ground. That all of us have stories. And all of us have the ability to lead on these issues and to lead in politics. I never want to hide that part of me.”
Kleeb grew up in Plantation, Florida. Her mother was the chair of the Broward County Right to Life Committee. Her father was president of the North Dade Chamber of Commerce. Both were staunch Republicans—as was she. “My dad and my grandmother had a Burger King in Hollywood, Florida. I was draining pickles and cutting tomatoes and onions in the back growing up.”
She started dieting in sixth grade. When, aged fifteen, she fainted and was rushed to the emergency room, where she went into cardiac arrest, she weighed just seventy pounds. In her eight years of treatment she saw many women discharged after a week, or a month— whenever their funds ran out. Eventually Kleeb’s family insurance coverage reached its benefit cap. She told the crowd in Omaha that she was only able to remain in the treatment that was saving her life thanks to financial support from her grandmother—a circumstance that first led her to question her own Republican roots.
In college, at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, Kleeb “wasn’t really involved in politics. I was very involved in community service. I was raised in a Catholic school, and that’s when Clinton started talking about AmeriCorps. That was this other political moment for me: a politician is actually talking about something that I care about. Community service, being connected to my community . . .”
Her first job after graduation was running an AmeriCorps program in Tallahassee. “I was very young. I don’t know how I was able to convince them that I should be running it at twenty-one, or whatever I was. We were doing literacy for kids in a one hundred percent African American school in a deep-poverty area of Tallahassee that I lived in. I did that for five years. And there, too, the only way I was able to get parents to the table to help their kids learn to read was by telling my own story.”
She then enrolled in a master’s degree program at American University and moved to Washington, DC. “I wanted to test out the theory that activism and community service kept me alive, kept me connected to recovery. I did my fieldwork at the same treatment center I had been in.”
Kleeb was still a Republican. “This is when the whole Terri Schiavo thing happened. She was in that coma because she had bulimia. So she couldn’t get access to mental-health care. But here [Jeb] Bush wasn’t funding mental-health care, but wanted to keep her [alive in a coma]. It really pissed me off. And I started to try to get involved in politics.”
Two friends from college had formed a political consulting firm whose biggest client was Peter Lewis, chairman of Progressive Insurance and a major donor to liberal causes. One day they invited Kleeb along to a meeting. “They were talking about the youth vote; [how] young people never turn out, so candidates don’t talk to them. I was young at the time, and I was like, ‘Give me a million dollars and we’ll figure it out.’ I was always big on issue-based organizing, and they wanted it to be Democratic, so they gave the money to Young Democrats of America and told them: ‘Hire Jane.’ They said they’d hire me if they got the money. But they also said I’d have to change my registration, because I was still a Republican!”
Kleeb’s conviction that political activism had saved her own life made her an effective, charismatic organizer. After bottoming out in 1996 and 2000, participation rates for young voters started to rise. The Iraq War doubtless had an effect; while rates for eighteen-to twenty-four-year-old Republicans continued to fall slightly in 2004, rates for young Democrats increased by 6 percent.40 The trend continued in 2008 with the historic candidacy of Barack Obama.
As executive director of the Young Democrats, Kleeb worked with Rock the Vote, which led to a job with MTV’s “Street Team.” An encounter at the 2005 Democratic National Committee meeting in Phoenix had more lasting consequences. She heard that a candidate for the House of Representatives from Nebraska wanted to speak to Kleeb’s group. “Nebraska? No way,” Kleeb later described her response to the New York Times. “I’m not helping some Republican fake liberal who just wants to use the youth vote to get out of the primaries.” Then she saw the candidate’s picture, and decided Scott Kleeb might be worth meeting. “Whatever it takes to get him here.”41 Scott Kleeb wasn’t a fake, or a Republican. A fourth-generation Nebraskan who’d been on the bull-riding team at the University of Colorado, and spent his summers working as a ranch hand, Kleeb had written a prize-winning PhD dissertation at Yale on the history of cattle ranching.
Running in the heavily Republican Third District—which had given George W. Bush, who campaigned for his opponent, 75 percent of the vote in 2004—Kleeb lost by ten points. During the campaign he’d asked Jane to help him organize young voters, taking her to see the family homestead in Broken Bow. “I fell in love with the Sandhills way before I fell in love with Scott.”42 The Thanksgiving after the 2006 election she returned to Nebraska to spend the holiday with Scott and his family. Married the following March, they bought a house in Hastings, a town of about twenty-five thousand at the intersection of two railroad lines.
“I always try to remind people that if I had been fighting an oil train rather than a pipeline, I don’t think we would have been able to galvanize the unlikely alliance that we did, because so many people have deep connections and strong emotional ties to the railroads. If you drive down NE-2, the Sandhills Byway we call it, you’ll see beautiful rolling sand hills, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then you’ll see a town similar to Hastings . . . Kool-Aid was invented in Hastings. That’s our claim to fame.”
With Obama in the White House and committed to health care reform, Kleeb became Nebraska state director of Change That Works. Funded by the Service Employees International Union, the group was intended to mobilize grassroots support in twelve states for what would become the Affordable Care Act. Ben Nelson, Nebraska’s lone Democratic senator and a serial defector against his party, was a prime target. Part of what made the group different was that, after years of Democrats writing off rural America, Change That Works built a progressive infrastructure in Arkansas (two votes in the Senate for the ACA), North Dakota (two votes in the Senate for the ACA), and Nebraska.43 The other thing different about Nebraska was Jane Kleeb.
SEIU officials in Washington repeatedly pushed Kleeb “to be more aggressive with Nelson, but she refused.”44 It wasn’t because she was soft—or squeamish. “We used to have these things called ‘Wimp Wednesdays,’ where we were highlighting conservatives that would be wimpy on issues—which was funny.” She just didn’t think playing hardball with Nelson would work. Instead she began collecting stories.
“We started recording people in rural Nebraska and in urban Nebraska telling their health care stories, and telling their union organizing stories [remember, the SEIU was paying for this] and we put them up on YouTube. We did this Twenty-Four Hours of Health Care, where we posted a new YouTube video every hour—they’re still there, actually.45 That was the first time where it hit me like a big truck that people in rural Nebraska were actually not that different than people in urban Nebraska. They didn’t see themselves in our political leaders, and they desperately needed affordable health care.”
“We also collected letters from people all across the state” detailing their own health insurance horror stories, then strung huge clotheslines outside of Nelson’s office in Lincoln “and pinned all the letters onto it.” Realizing the depth of Nelson’s religious faith, Kleeb arranged for a pastor with breast cancer, who had been denied coverage by her insurer, to meet with the senator. Her group also got two dozen religious leaders—including Catholic priests, Protestant pastors, and a rabbi—to sign a letter saying the law would do nothing to change existing prohibitions on federal funding for abortion (which Nelson had cited as a ground for objection). Kleeb’s patient, constant pressure paid off when Nelson became the sixtieth, and final, vote in favor of Obamacare.
Although it would consume the next four years of her life, the Keystone XL pipeline was not yet on Jane Kleeb’s radar. She wanted to keep working in Nebraska “organizing people based on issues, but doing it from a progressive and populist perspective,” and with Obamacare on the statute books “I knew the SEIU would be pulling out.” So she went to see Dick Holland, an Omaha advertising man who’d been an early investor in his friend Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway company, and who spent the latter half of his life giving away much of the fortune he’d made.
“I said, ‘Listen. We just did all this great organizing on health reform. I can’t go into the [Democratic] Party because the party is not ready for this level of organizing.’ He knew that too.” Holland agreed to fund a new group, BOLD Nebraska, that would work on progressive issues across party lines. “We thought we’d start by sticking with health care,” pressing for the state to set up an exchange. Three months into the campaign Kleeb “started to get calls from farmers and ranchers because of my husband,” who was working at the Morgan Ranch, a family-run operation in the Sandhills raising Herefords and Japanese Wagyu beef cattle.
“They’d say, ‘Can you help us? We have no idea what we’re doing, but we know we’re up against a big oil company.’ I wasn’t yet connected to any of the national environmental groups. I had no environmental background. I didn’t even know who Bill McKibben was.
“I did know that Republicans would be for it, because they love oil pipeline companies,” which meant that, in Nebraska, she’d be fighting uphill. Since it was ranchers who’d approached her, “I immediately started organizing landowners.” Her first move was to contact John Hansen, longtime president of the Nebraska Farmers Union. “I asked John Hansen if he would come and validate what oil was doing in these small towns. He came with us for the first several community-education sessions . . . [H]e would ask a local rancher or a farmer to give the opening remarks.”
At the time, there didn’t appear to be much common ground between often-conservative farmers and ranchers and the environmental movement, whose supporters were typically depicted in the media as young, urban, and unkempt. The pipeline itself—a thirtysix-inch steel tube stretching from Hardisty in Alberta, Canada, to Steele City, Nebraska, capable of carrying 830,000 barrels a day of tar sands oil, fracked oil from the Bakken shale in North Dakota, and dilbit (a cocktail of thick, tar-like petroleum thinned with benzene and other chemicals so it flows faster)—was often described as a life-line freeing US consumers from dependence on oil imported from the Middle East.
TransCanada also claimed the pipeline would create forty-two thousand American jobs, and though the official State Department report estimated there would only be thirty-five permanent jobs, it did estimate that building the pipeline would create an additional 3,900 temporary jobs during two years of construction.46 Those were more than enough to win the support of the United Association, the pipefitters and plumbers union—and, initially, the backing of Hillary Clinton, who in October 2010 said she was “inclined” to approve the pipeline.* “We’re either going to be dependent on dirty oil from the Gulf or dirty oil from Canada,” Clinton said. With labor and its traditional allies on one side, and the environmental movement on the other, the Democratic Party was divided—and paralyzed.
That didn’t stop Kleeb. “You had some people who felt it was our patriotic duty to help get us off Middle East oil. [And] some people were opposed to it . . . from day one because of eminent domain.” (Under eminent domain the state is allowed to take private property for public use. In the case of Keystone XL, opponents argued that building a pipeline for a Canadian company was not a valid public purpose.) “It was a mixed crowd. So we would go and do these community education sessions: PowerPoints, handouts—whatever I could find online. I was learning about the issue as I was teaching, and so were farmers and ranchers, and so we were all teaching each other, which looking back was probably one of the most successful parts of the model because it wasn’t like some expert coming in and then leaving.
“We were all literally in it together trying to figure it out. People in rural communities have a deep connection to the birds, to the cranes in particular, and they’re in a migratory path with the pipeline, and so there were all these reasons why people in rural communities would be against this big pipeline. And then I started to realize that we have to get landowners to say that they are not going to sign contracts—”
It took two years for Kleeb to realize that she needed to organize a landowners’ strike. “Now when we’re advising other communities, we tell them, ‘Day one this is what you need to do.’ Still, we do have twenty percent of the pipeline locked up. If we’d started earlier we would have had fifty percent locked up.
“TransCanada had started this group called Landowners for Fairness. They would have landowners sign a contract saying, ‘We’re going to negotiate the easement terms as a group.’ So they were never trying to stop the pipeline. They were just trying to get a better deal for the landowners. I thought, ‘Well, that’s fundamentally messed up. They are immediately surrendering.’ So I started flyering at those meetings in the parking lot, and asked Native Americans to come and drum, and we had people holding signs against the pipeline.”
The involvement of Native Americans changed the nature of the battle—and the lives of many of those involved. It also meant bridging perhaps the deepest divide in American life. “Faith Spotted Eagle, a member of the Yankton Sioux, asked me to come to a meeting that she was holding where they were going to sign a treaty against the Keystone XL Pipeline. She wanted me and the farmers and ranchers to come up and do a workshop on the Ogallala Aquifer, because obviously water is very important to the Native Americans . . . I had never worked with Native Americans.”
A vast underground reservoir, the Ogallala Aquifer holds enough water to cover the entire continental US to the depth of two feet. Stretching from South Dakota to Texas, its center is right under the state of Nebraska.47 The source of about 30 percent of the groundwater used for irrigation in American agriculture, if it became depleted or contaminated the Great Plains, bread basket for the country, would quickly become the Great American Desert. The water is very near the surface; in the Sandhills, ranchers typically just dig a hole and the water pours in. TransCanada’s original plan took the pipeline through ninety-two miles of the Sandhills, with the pipe often buried in water.48
TransCanada itself admitted the pipeline was likely to leak eleven times over its fifty-year lifespan; John Stansbury, who teaches engineering at the University of Nebraska, says the risk was ten times that.49 In November 2017, another Keystone pipeline in South Dakota leaked 210,000 gallons of oil near the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation.
“I felt sure there would be some hostile feelings, because they are now farming and ranching [land that used to belong to Native Americans], especially up in the Sandhills where you find arrowheads where you’re just walking. It is Native American land.
“So, I brought fifteen farmers and ranchers with me, and we went out to the Rosebud Casino, and it was a two-day meeting. At first we were all very nervous. And they organize their meetings differently. It’s not like, ‘Here is the schedule.’ There was no real agenda, and about half a day of just ceremony before anything was discussed. But then they asked us to do our presentation, so I got up and gave this PowerPoint presentation about the Ogallala Aquifer, and then one of the elders asked if the farmers and ranchers would tell their stories.
“They got up one by one. We were all sitting in a circle at this point, and they started telling their stories, and naturally, not prodded or anything, started talking about how they knew that the land that they’re now farming and ranching is [the Native Americans’] ancestral home ground, and that they love the land just as much as they know Native Americans do, and that is the common bond between them, that they take care of the land for the next generation, which is a deeply held value of farmers and ranchers, especially in the Sandhills where they’re going on seven generations at this point, and have family members lined up to take over the ranch.
“Chief Arvol Looking Horse, who is one of the huge spiritual leaders of the Sioux, was there. He didn’t say a word the whole day, and sat there with his arms crossed, just looking down. I was very nervous. So, he stands up and he just looks at everybody and opens his hands, and says, ‘Welcome to the tribe.’ After that it was easy moving forward, because I’m a fast talker!”
One thing Kleeb says she learned from the experience is that sometimes she needs to slow down. Another is “that I don’t have all the answers. That maybe [my] idea is not the best idea.” Wincing at the memory, she recalls “some really stupid mistakes. We had to get a permit for those twelve tepees. Part of the agreement with the Parks Police was that we wouldn’t have people sleep in them. And I didn’t know the deep emotional tie that people have to tepees, and so on one of the calls there was a clear pushback: ‘You have no idea what you’re doing . . . These are our sacred homes.’ And I just did not get it, and was like, ‘You can’t sleep in them. This is not Occupy Wall Street,’ and that was obviously very offensive.”
Local knowledge—the kind you can only get from attentive, faceto-face listening—is crucial to the way Kleeb works. But that doesn’t make her a technophobe. Before it became a movement, BOLD was a website. “I think people assumed, because we were organizing mostly rural folks, that somehow they’re not online. They very much are online, and are on Facebook all the time! Maybe Twitter not so much, but definitely Facebook. They go to websites to get information, because their newspapers only come out once a week or once every two weeks. Our BOLD website was critical for sharing long pieces of information. We used Facebook for all those strong actions—like ‘Call Senator Heineman,’ or ‘Write a letter to the editor’—that keep people engaged. We created a very strong visual brand so people felt tied—emotionally tied—to fighting the pipeline.”
The Keystone XL pipeline route passes through three states on its way to Steele City, and three more down to the Gulf. Yet the most significant opposition has come in Nebraska. According to Kleeb, that’s no accident. “My first conversations in Nebraska were around a tiny, little kitchen table in the ranch house that Scott lived in with other ranchers. And they all described politics in a very populist way. They hated big corporations and they hate big government. That the only people that they can rely on are their neighbors. They would talk about the land in ways that Bill McKibben would talk about the land.”
Nebraska was where, on July 4, 1892, the men and women attending the inaugural convention of the Populist Party at the Omaha Coliseum voted to endorse what became known as the Omaha Platform. “We meet,” proclaimed the preamble, “in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench.” The party’s purpose? “Assembled on the anniversary of the birthday of the nation . . . we seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of ‘the plain people.’” Many of their demands—women’s suffrage, a graduated income tax, secret ballot, the direct election of senators, enforcement of the eight-hour day—though radical at the time, have long since passed into law. Others, like the call to protect “American labor” from exploited foreign competition, remain controversial.
But as Kleeb reminded me, Nebraska still has no private utilities. “Yeah, it’s from the Populists. And because eighty years ago, when they were creating public power, our small rural towns didn’t have any electricity, and it would have been too expensive—there’s no way a private utility would have made money. But it’s still against the law. The same thing with public education. We don’t allow charter schools in our state.”
Nebraska’s Populist heritage means that what can seem radical elsewhere is accepted here as just common sense—or at least worth debating. Nebraska remains the only state with a unicameral legislature—another legacy of Populism. Some aspects of the state’s distinctive political landscape, though, are less congenial to progressives. While Kleeb insists that rural and urban areas share the same basic concerns, “there’s no question they use different words. Rural folks definitely use the word ‘community’ and ‘God’ way more than urban people. Here you can’t just say that you respect people that are prolife. You have to deeply understand where they’re coming from.”
As perhaps the most effective “wedge issue” in electoral politics, differences over abortion and a woman’s right to control her own fertility have repeatedly allowed Republicans to attract and hold voters who disagree with them on economics or the environment—especially in rural states. Here again, Kleeb uses her own story to connect, describing herself as “both pro-life and pro-choice.”
“I think the vast majority of Americans are both pro-life and prochoice. We’ve forced politicians, and sometimes individuals, to say that you’re one or the other, and that it’s some black-and-white issue. I’ve had an abortion, and I think it’s really difficult to put women and their families—when families are involved in the decision—into this black-and-white position. It’s a very personal choice, and I don’t think that government should ever restrict women’s right to make that choice in their own lives.”
“But I also . . . there’s no question in my mind that life begins at conception and that that is a precious life, that we should do everything we can when women decide to give birth, to make sure that they have the health care they need.”
When Kleeb had Kora [the oldest of her three daughters], “I was a single mom. So I both had an abortion and [then] chose to have a baby as a single mom, [when] I was working full-time and going to graduate school . . . And because family leave is not a great thing in our country, I had to go on WIC [the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children] for almost three months because I didn’t have the income from my full-time job anymore. Those are the programs that, from a very personal perspective, are why I firmly am in the Democratic column . . . I believe that government is a safety net for families. I sometimes feel that some pro-choice leaders don’t talk about those aspects.
“[But] I’ve never met a woman that’s proud she had an abortion. It’s not like I’m putting a bumper sticker on my minivan that I had an abortion. And maybe some people in the pro-choice community wish that that was different . . .”
When Kleeb was elected chair of the Nebraska Democrats in June 2016, Esquire political columnist Charles Pierce called it “a textbook example of how movements outside the formal political process can energize the institutions within the formal political process.” Kleeb, he wrote, “will turn out to be a formidable surrogate” for Hillary Clinton50—positioning her to push the incoming administration to the left. “I decided to run for party chair because I honestly thought Clinton was going to win, and if the pipeline came back up I’d be in a position with the party where I could be advocating on a high political level and we’d be okay,” she told me. Once Keystone XL was finally laid to rest she could turn all her attention to organizing.
It didn’t quite work out that way. Donald Trump carried Nebraska by twenty-five points. His victory not only brought the “Black Snake”—as the Native Americans called the pipeline—back from the dead.51 It also set off a civil war between Clinton Democrats and Sanders supporters that made the task of building an effective opposition even harder. In late January 2018, the party’s Unity and Reform Commission issued a report calling for a 60 percent cut in the number of superdelegates, a transparent vote count in caucus states, same-day registration, and primaries open to independent voters—all key Sanders demands. But the report, itself the result of compromise and negotiations—endorsed by both DNC chair Tom Perez (seen as aligned with the Clinton wing) and vice chair Keith Ellison (a Sanders backer)—has yet to take effect. Meanwhile Kleeb has been struggling to raise the money to pay her own salary.
Asked how the national party could help, she responded, “One, stop screwing our local candidates. Two . . . stop giving lip service to rural and red states and actually give us the resources—both financial and training—that we need. If you’re serious about turning around a party, it is a full-time job . . . It is mind-boggling to me that we only have twelve paid [state] chairs. All the rest are either part-time, or full-time volunteers like me. And then you wonder why we’re losing elections at the state level . . .”
Not that Kleeb is waiting around. “We’re doing these Blue Bench trainings. When we first introduced this and said, ‘We’re gonna do one in Omaha, one in Lincoln, and one in a rural community,’ each time, people thought I was crazy. This next one is: How do you do GOTV [Get Out the Vote]? How do you target? How do you cut walk lists [showing door-to-door canvassers which houses to visit]? How do you even get into the VAN [the party’s Voter Activation Network software]? We have this stripped-down training, so we’re not locking people in a room for eight hours. It’s a three-hour training each time. Forty minutes of concrete nuts and bolts—and then we’re out in the field.” When 2017 began, Kleeb already had two hundred thousand miles on her minivan.
As for Keystone XL, Trump issued an executive order approving the pipeline within days of his inauguration. Yet Kleeb remains not just optimistic, but confident. In November 2017 the Nebraska Public Service Commission approved a route for the pipeline—only it wasn’t the route TransCanada had applied for. That same month a federal judge ruled that a lawsuit against the pipeline brought by BOLD, the Sierra Club, the National Resources Defense Council, and other environmental groups could proceed.
Kleeb explained why, contrary to most press coverage, both decisions were “a win for us, because I’m not sure TransCanada can afford two years . . . In order to get all the other easements they would then need in South Dakota [to follow the route the state approved to connect with an older pipeline] . . . They’d have to go across the border and then come down. They would have to cross tribal land, and there’s no way the Rosebud Sioux, for example, are going to give up their land to Keystone.”
Time—and the falling price of oil—is on the side of Keystone’s opponents. And if it comes to that, Kleeb knows the Cowboy and Indian Alliance is ready to ride again.
* According to OpenSecrets.org, the United Association donated $4,008,894 to the Clinton campaign during the 2016 election cycle. As secretary of state, Clinton had allowed Cardno Entrix, a private consulting firm whose clients included TransCanada, to conduct the department’s first environmental impact statement for the pipeline. After repeatedly avoiding the question, Clinton withdrew her support for Keystone in September 2015.