Have you ever seen a ransom note with its clipped and pasted, mismatched letters making demands and pronouncements as something or someone of value is held hostage? Imagine the playbook of Barack Obama and those Democrats who continue to do his bidding to be written in such type.

Just name any issue confronting America currently – energy, immigration, national security – and you’ll find that the Obama administration is setting the stage for confrontation of the worst sorts. This doubling down is happening even in the face of the beat down the president and his failed leftist policies suffered in the midterm election.

Take Friday’s passage of House legislation to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. Bureaucratic red tape and obstruction began before George W. Bush left office, but now, a bipartisan majority (221 Republicans and 31 Democrats) voted to move the pipeline’s prospects one step closer to existence. The Senate is expected to take a floor vote Tuesday.

Americans want to strengthen domestic energy production and processing, but the president stands in the way. And the message to the White House is clear: Stop stalling!

Obama stays on the leash of environmental radicals whose argument is simple, according to The Washington Post: “Environmentalists say the pipeline is especially harmful because it lowers transportation costs and thus provides more incentive for the development of Alberta’s oil sands.”

You read that correctly. Building a transcontinental pipeline to move 730,000 barrels of crude per day from Alberta, Canada, southward, picking up 100,000 barrels per day in Montana and North Dakota to be refined in Texas, would be bad because it lowers the cost of moving the fuel and incentivizes commerce.

No one said those who hold good things hostage are rational. Clearly, handing America’s energy policy over to those who worship the dirt rather than serving as stewards of the earth is absolutely nuts.

These same environmental leftists will be the first to join the anti-war crowd in chanting daisy-laced peace poems as Americans fight for our interests – among them, energy – in the Middle East, and as we contend with an aggressive Russian government driven by fossil-fuel production.

A majority of Americans, labor unions and a bipartisan voice in Congress see the value of growing domestic energy production and processing with hundreds, even thousands, of high-wage construction jobs and engineering positions that will monitor the pipeline once built. However, those on the Left who oppose such industry and technology are among those who fret about the minimum wage of the kid working the deep fryer at McDonald’s.

But what about that Senate vote Tuesday?

The good policy held hostage by an ecofascist Obama White House will see the light of day only because the wave of Nov. 5 also endangers Louisiana’s Democrat Senator Mary Landrieu. As Landrieu faces an impending loss in December’s runoff, she is suddenly the champion of a bipartisan effort in the Senate to move the pipeline legislation to the floor from its shackled existence in Majority Leader Harry Reid’s office.

Landrieu’s Republican opponent, Rep. Bill Cassidy, hit the bull’s-eye when he opined, “I have to smile when Senator Landrieu says politics are not involved. Clearly Reid did not care about the 40,000 jobs that would be created for families which are struggling but he does care about Senator Landrieu’s job.”

The Keystone XL pipeline legislation is likely to face the veto of a president who has an agenda that doesn’t include the best interests of the American people and our great nation. “I have to constantly push back against this idea that somehow the Keystone pipeline is either this massive jobs bill for the United States or is somehow lowering gas prices,” Obama said.

Whether it’s the unprecedented opportunity for America to have greater control of our energy policy, and therefore greater national security, or any other critical issue in the next few weeks, be prepared. The extortion of the Left will continue as the governing elites not only ignore our Constitution but also that which is best for America.