Video: North Dakota Rep. Kevin Cramer Got a Little Excited When President Trump Mentioned the Dakota Access Pipeline
U.S. President Trump Addresses Joint Session of Congress - Washington, U.S. - 28/02/17 - U.S. President Donald Trump pumps his fist as he arrives at the podium. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
President Donald Trump seems to have turned a lot of heads last night with his address to a joint session of Congress. This morning people both on the right and the left are congratulating him.
There wasn’t much specific to North Dakota in his speech last night, other than a brief mention of the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines, both projects of huge importance to North Dakota’s energy industry which Trump says he’s behind.
And according to this report from E&E Daily, North Dakota Congressman Kevin Cramer got a little excited when Trump mentioned the pipelines.
Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.), one of the earliest backers of President Trump in the House, proved to be his loudest cheerleader last night when the president delivered his first address to Congress.
“Yes!” the third-term lawmaker shouted from the House floor when Trump noted his administration had cleared the way for construction of the Keystone XL and Dakota Access oil pipelines.
“That was me, yes it was,” Cramer, a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and a backer of both pipelines that will carry oil through his state, told E&E News after the speech. He called Trump’s speech the best before Congress since President Reagan’s addresses three decades ago.
I didn’t hear Cramer during the speech myself. Here’s that moment in the speech which I cut from the official White House video release.
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I still can’t hear Cramer. Oh well.
It’s not at all surprising that he’s excited by those projects going forward. The Keystone XL project, which would provide 100,000 barrels per day of transport capacity for North Dakota crude oil, was delayed by the Obama administration for months. The Dakota Access project, which will provide something like 450,000 barrels per day of oil capacity, was delayed by the Obama administration for a shorter amount of time, but that delay helped feed violent rioting which terrorized south central North Dakota for months.
It’s nice to see leadership in the federal government which considers infrastructure projects like pipelines on their merits and not the whims of political extremists.
