A Ray of Light

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

06 November14

asting about for a reason to get out of bed for the next two years, I found a reason to put at least one foot on the floor. It was out in Nebraska's Second Congressional District. Republican incumbent Lee Terry, who is perhaps the Keystone XL pipeline's BFF 4-ever, got skunked by his Democratic challenger, a state senator named Brad Ashford. Terry didn't help himself much, either. He went public about keeping his congressional salary during the 2013 government shutdown. And then, late in the game, he set aloft perhaps the most mendacious, race-baiting television advertisement of the past 25 years. (Terry also likely did not profit by a last-minute endorsement in court from the crazy killer whom he'd dragooned into his campaign.) But there is no question that the people who have been organizing on the ground against the pipeline in Nebraska organized against Terry. There is no question that, come January, Lee Terry will be an ex-congressperson. (He'll be an extraction industry lobbyist about 11 seconds after he hands over the keys to his office.) I choose not to believe that this is coincidence.

I mention this to highlight the fact that anyone who believes that the fight against the death-funnel ended on Tuesday night, either because the Republicans have the clout to force the issue now, or because the president will use it as a bargaining chip, are sadly mistaken. Ordinarily, I don't have a lot of patience for not-in-my-backyard issues. The one exception I make is when people's actual backyards are at stake. There is a constituency in Nebraska that does not want this pipeline built because it will endanger their health and their personal economies. This constituency also has grown tired of being lectured by pundits and by oil-soaked and money-fattened politicians through whose backyards no pipeline will ever run. TransCanada, the multinational behind the death funnel, has progressed from threatening individual landowners to threatening the entire country, largely because the efforts of this constituency have been effective in those places where the pipeline actually will go, if not in Arlington or Bethesda, or the downslopes of Capitol Hill. Lee Terry got crossways with this constituency, and Lee Terry no longer has a job. This is not a coincidence.