The State Department announced Wednesday that it has decided to reject—at least for now—a permit for the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which would have brought heavy crude oil from a source in Canada to the Gulf Coast. Though on its face the announcement seems like the end of the fight over the pipeline, it really marks a new beginning: if the Drill, Baby, Drill Republican Party has anything to say about it, this decision will be a major issue in the election.

The Administration tried to keep the pipeline from becoming an election topic. The Obama team knew that the issue had the potential to be a loser no matter how it was decided: approve the pipeline and anger the environmentalists the President will need during his reëlection campaign; block it, and be portrayed as having killed tens of thousands of jobs to satisfy the Democratic base. (Last year, Jane Mayer wrote about the surprisingly effective protests that environmentalists—including former New Yorker staff writer Bill McKibben—mounted against the pipeline.) So the Administration came up with a dodge. Last fall, it announced that the State Department would look at alternative routes for the pipeline that might satisfy environmental concerns. Conveniently, this review would not be completed until after November of 2012.

If you want to, you can convince yourself that this is simply how long a review of this kind takes, and maybe there’s a small measure of truth to that. But there’s a pattern to the Administration’s actions here—this isn’t the first important decision on the environment that it has pushed back until after the election.

Of course, Congressional Republicans aren’t stupid, and they’re certainly not the kind of people who are going to let the President take away a good election-year issue without paying some price for it. So they put a condition on the payroll-tax-cut extension they recently agreed to—in exchange for the extension, they gave the Administration a sixty-day deadline to make a decision about the pipeline, specifying that only Obama, not the State Department, could deny the permit.

Now that the Administration has made its decision known, the political maneuvering is proceeding according to the same script. The White House is blaming Congressional Republicans, saying they knew that sixty days wasn’t enough time to study other routes for the pipeline, and trying to maintain Obama’s distance from the decision. (“Everyone—a lot of people, and certainly we—made clear back in December that a political effort to short-circuit that process for ideological reasons would be counterproductive, because a proper review that weighed all the important issues in this case could not be achieved in sixty days, according to the State Department, which, again, runs this review process,” Jay Carney, the White House Press Secretary, said.)

And Congressional Republicans are blaming the Administration, saying it sold American workers out for political reasons—and they’re putting it on Obama. The statement from House Speaker John Boehner’s office said: “President Obama is about to destroy tens of thousands of American jobs and sell American energy security to the Chinese. The president won’t stand up to his political base even to create American jobs. This is not the end of this fight.” (Not seen yet: claims about Obama doing nothing to end our dependence on the Middle East, like this unintentionally hilarious line that Rick Perry has been using on the campaign trail, “Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don’t have to buy from a foreign source.”)

It’s worth noting that Boehner’s claim that “tens of thousands of American jobs” are at stake comes from TransCanada, the company that wants to build the pipeline, and that it’s already been debunked—more reliable estimates put the number at about five or six thousand jobs. But this is a political battle in an election year; it’s the fight, not the truth, that ultimately matters.

Photograph by Andrew Harrer/Getty Images.