It turns out Republicans and Democrats truly can work together to craft a bipartisan pipeline safety bill that satisfies both parties! And then they can accidentally pass the old version instead.
The bill, which laid out new penalties for pipeline safety violations following a deadly explosion last year, was laboriously hashed out in a bipartisan committee. Then the House went ahead and passed the old version anyway.
Due to human error, the House on Monday and Senate on Tuesday both passed a pipeline safety bill all right, but an earlier version of the bill — not the final bipartisan, bicameral compromise.
“There was a House clerical error and we expect the correcting resolution to be approved in the House and Senate without issue,” said Caley Gray, a spokesman for Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who was a lead author of Senate pipeline safety legislation this year. The Senate was the one that discovered the error, Gray added.
They've already started fixing it — the House passed the correct bill yesterday — but this isn't doing anything to help legislators shed their Keystone Kongress image.
