Fred Upton

Rep. Fred Upton, determine to make the GOP as unpopular as possible.

BALTIMORE – House Republicans, undaunted by the payroll tax holiday debacle that dinged their conference last month, said Friday that they were considering using the Keystone XL Pipeline as a chip in the next round of negotiations over the tax break, as part of their overall efforts to push back against White House policies this year.

We are going to be looking at every option to keep this issue at the forefront,” said Representative Fred Upton of Michigan, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee and a member of the bicameral conference committee tasked with coming up with a bill to extend the payroll tax holiday and unemployment benefits through the rest of the year.

Mr. Upton said that reviving the 1,700-mile pipeline project, which would stretch from Canada to the Gulf Coast and which President Obama rejected this week for now, would likely be a contingency Republicans would seek in the tax break negotiations. Certainly that is within the scope of the conference,” he said.

Upending Mr. Obama administration’s decision on Keystone, which Speaker John A. Boehner said this week was “not the end of the fight,” is one of the central goals of the Republican agenda this year. publicans chose to highlight the issue in their first news conference here, and this week sent out e-mail blasts highlighting all the editorials from around the country criticizing the president’s decision and drawing attention to Congressional Democrats who oppose it.

We’re going to do everything we can to keep in on the front burner” Mr. ton said.