Scott Brown's Plot to Sabotage His Opponent's Bill Is Backfiring

New Hampshire senate hopeful Scott Brown successfully pushed Republican leadership to sink his opponent's bipartisan bill on Monday — but he also sunk a promising vote on Keystone XL, and the pipeline lobby is not pleased.

New Hampshire Senate hopeful Scott Brown successfully pushed Republican leadership to sink his opponent's bipartisan energy bill on Monday, but he also sunk a promising vote on Keystone XL, and the pipeline lobby is not pleased. If the energy efficiency bill proposed by Democrat Jeanne Shaheen (who Brown is challenging in November) and Republican Rob Portman had passed, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would have agreed to allow a standalone vote on the pipeline — which, funny enough, Brown actually supports.

As the Huffington Post reports, Teamsters Local 633 Secretary-Treasurer David Laughton sent out a release on Thursday condemning Brown's "blind partisanship" which "appears to have cost us a stand alone vote to proceed with the Keystone XL pipeline." Though New Hampshire's Teamsters support Shaheen despite her opposition to Keystone, Brown has been courting the group by attending their rallies and writing op-eds for local papers in favor of the bill. "In an op-ed, and more recently at a rally we co-hosted, Scott Brown claimed that he supported the Keystone pipeline," Laughton said. "But clearly when he told us he wanted 'to get this done' he was just lying to our face."

Brown hasn't denied reports that he sabotaged the bill, which would have encouraged energy efficiency in buildings, but would have also given Shaheen a nice feather in her cap. In fact, as New York magazine noted, New Hampshire's Republican Party has already used the bill's failure to attack Shaheen, writing that she "doesn't have a single legislative accomplishment to run on as she seeks re-election. It's time to end Jeanne Shaheen's failed tenure in the Senate and replace her with a responsible Republican who can get results for New Hampshire." Given the circumstances, we're not sure which results-driven Republican they're referring to.