How does a pipeline end up in a debt ceiling bill?

Let’s follow the money:

From Open Secrets: the pipeline’s builder, NextEra, gave $2,812,358 to legislators for the 2021-22 cycle which put them in the top 1% of all donors. Here are the top recipients of their 2022 senatorial political funding:

(Schumer received $302,600 and Manchin received $66,850 in that cycle.)

Reading our local "newspaper": apparently, there is no opposition to the Mountain Valley Pipeline

Wednesday’s front page headline in the Wheeling Intelligencer:

Lawmakers Praise Deal to Fast-Track Pipeline

Today’s editorial:

MVP Completion A Win in Congress

Neither suggested that there was any opposition to the pipeline. On the other hand, today’s Charleston Gazette-Mail featured a long article that explained how the legislation eliminated judicial review:

The debt limit deal would eliminate judicial review that has found key environmental harms from the Mountain Valley Pipeline and repeated failures by federal agencies charged with protecting against them: https://t.co/OIbsKgasZW

— Charleston Gazette-Mail (@wvgazettemail) June 1, 2023

And yesterday, the G-M gave space to the pipeline’s critics:

WV environmentalists are furious at the inclusion of a federal debt limit deal provision that would block judicial review of permits for the pipeline that haven't held up in court: https://t.co/5Y3zN2eJ7a

— Charleston Gazette-Mail (@wvgazettemail) May 30, 2023

From that article:

Consistent with past legislative proposals from Manchin, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and Rep. Carol Miller, R-W.Va., the Fiscal Responsibility Act would prohibit legal challenges of any federal or state agency authorization for construction and initial operation of the gas pipeline.
“To be clear, this says the rules that apply to every other company don’t apply to MVP,” West Virginia Rivers Coalition Executive Director Angie Rosser said. “It says our people, our waters, are not worthy of equal protection under the law.”

Amendments?

Virginia senator Tim Kaine just moved to remove the pipeline from the debt ceiling bill:

Sen. Tim Kaine introduces his amendment to strip the Mountain Valley Pipeline approval from the debt-limit bill.

In statement, he says it’s “the definition of unfair and opens the door to corruption”https://t.co/icupUNvkrV pic.twitter.com/p63RYfCZhp

— Andrew Desiderio (@AndrewDesiderio) June 1, 2023

More specifically:

I filed an amendment to stop the fast-tracking of the Mountain Valley Pipeline—especially when it takes away Virginians’ land. We shouldn’t let an unhappy corporation go to Congress to bypass the process everybody else goes through. Everyday people don’t get that deal.

— Tim Kaine (@timkaine) June 1, 2023

It's interesting that Kaine, who represents another state that will be directly affected by the pipeline, is willing to question the process -- something our representatives are unwilling to do.