Republicans in Congress challenged Barack Obama to drop his veto threat and sign a newly passed Keystone XL bill into law on Wednesday – or risk seeing the measure attached to other pieces of legislation.

In a 270-152 vote, the House of Representatives voted to approve construction of the contentious pipeline – a direct challenge to Obama who has said repeatedly he will veto the bill.



The measure will be sent to the White House on Friday. Obama has 10 days after that to render his decision – but Republicans said they were braced for a veto.



“Right now he has indicated he is going to veto,” John Hoeven, the Republican Senator from North Dakota who was the architect of the Keystone XL bill, said.



He acknowledged that Republicans do not have the votes now to overcome a veto but said that the party leadership intended to attach Keystone measures on to other pieces of legislation. “We can attach it to other bills – energy, appropriations, the highway bill,” he said.



Twenty-nine Democrats voted with Republicans in favour of the bill, only one Republican, Justin Amash of Michigan, was opposed.

The bill also contains an implicit endorsement that climate change is real and not a hoax – an important symbolic shift for Republicans.



If Obama blocks the Keystone bill – as the White House has threatened repeatedly – it will be his third veto in his six years in the White House.

The house bill is identical to that passed by the Senate last month which means that Republicans – a majority of whom deny the existence of climate change – were now accepting it as a reality.



“Climate change exists. You’re saying that implicitly when you vote for the bill,” Peter DeFazio, a Democratic congressman from Oregon, pointed out.



However, the Senate bill acknowledging climate change is real and not a hoax does not say it is caused by human activity. The Senate voted down that proposal.



The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, appealed to Obama to reverse the veto threat. However, the House speaker, John Boehner, cast conciliatory gestures aside, accusing Obama of siding with a leftwing fringe against the broader American interest.



“Instead of listening to the people, the president is standing with a bunch of left-fringe extremists and anarchists,” Boehner told reporters on Wednesday. “The president needs to listen to the American people and say: ‘Yes, let’s build a Keystone pipeline.’”

Keystone XL, a project designed to transport crude from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries on the Texas Gulf coast, has morphed over the years into a broader fight about climate change.

The bill before the House of Representatives was approved by the Senate late last month as the first order of business under Republican control. The pipeline is still undergoing administrative review, a process overseen by the State Department that is now in its seventh year.

Obama has said repeatedly he would veto any measures seeking to short-circuit that process.

However, an end may be in sight. Last week, the State Department received comments from eight different government agencies – including the EPA – on whether the project is in the national interest.

The State Department has refused to make those reports public.



But in a letter released last week, the EPA suggested the State Department revisit its assumptions that the Keystone XL pipeline would not worsen climate change in light of falling oil prices.

The thinking behind the EPA review was that the cheap transport costs afforded by the pipeline – over tankers and oil trains – would make it easier for oil companies to operate in reduced profit margins of cheap oil.

It’s not known, however, how the EPA ruled on the broader question of the Keystone XL and the national interest.