I think he’s going to push it back another year.” 
 
 Judge Stephanie Stacy in Lincoln, the state’s capital, today struck down legislation that shifted the power to approve the pipeline route to Governor Dave Heineman, a Republican, from the state’s Public Service Commission. Legislation depriving the commission of that power violates the Nebraska Constitution, Stacy said, declaring the measure “unconstitutional and void.” 
 
 “Because the governor’s actions of Jan. 22, 2013, in approving the Keystone XL Pipeline route were predicated on an unconstitutional statute, the court also finds the governor’s actions in that regard must be declared null and void,” she said. Heineman, whose term expires at the end of this year and is barred by law from seeking re-election, had referred calls about the ruling to the office of Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning. State Department 
 
 Heineman said in a statement later that Bruning has already told the court the state plans to appeal. “This is an important issue for the state of Nebraska.” 
 
 TransCanada, which is seeking permission from the U.S. State Department to build the 1,179-mile northern leg of the pipeline, issued a statement saying it disagreed with Stacy’s ruling and was disappointed by it. Building a pipeline across an international border requires U.S. State Department approval, which the project doesn't have. They suffered a setback last month when the State Department’s final environmental assessment concluded that the pipeline would probably not alter emissions of global greenhouse gases. Today’s court’s decision strikes down a 2012 law passed by the Nebraska legislature that expedited pipeline route review and created a procedure under which siting could be determined by Heineman and the state’s Department of Environmental Quality, rather than the Public Service Commission. The ruling effectively rescinds Heineman’s notification to the Obama administration that Nebraska legal procedures for approving the pipeline had been satisfied, said attorney David Domina, who represents the suing landowners. “Now it is back to the drawing board for Governor Heineman and the Legislature,” Domina said in a statement. Stacy said in her ruling that the case isn’t about the merits of the Keystone XL pipeline project. “We are disappointed and disagree with the decision,” Shawn Howard, a TransCanada spokesman, said today in an e-mailed statement. “We will now analyze the judgment and decide what next steps may be taken.” 
 
 ‘Secure Supply’ 
 
 The company continues to believe in the project and the benefits it would confer to the U.S., including thousands of jobs and “a secure supply of crude oil from a trusted neighbor in Canada,” he said. The commission can take up to seven months to review an application before deciding whether to approve or deny it, and that time frame can be extended in certain cases. “The State Department analyzed a certain route in Nebraska and a judge has now thrown that route out,” Murphy said. The judge’s decision to overturn LB 1161, enacted in the final hours of the state’s 2012 session, means “there is no approved route across Nebraska now,” said David A. Domina, the lawyer who represented the three landowners who filed the lawsuit. “The chances are 99.82 percent,” the attorney said then, adding it may take as long as 10 months for Nebraska’s top court to render a ruling. “This statute is the only statute we have out here that creates a procedure for getting a permit” for a pipeline, said Domina, who is running for U.S. Senate as a Democrat this fall. Lancaster County District Court Judge Stephanie Stacy sided with three landowners who argued Nebraska's governor shouldn't be able to approve the pipeline's route.
– The Keystone XL pipeline was dealt yet another setback yesterday when a Nebraska judge struck down a law that the governor had used to approve the pipeline's route in the state, and seize land for it via eminent domain. The judge sided with three Nebraska landowners who argued that under the state's constitution, only the Public Service Commission has routing authority, the Wall Street Journal reports. "I am more or less ecstatic," one of the landowners said. "A good day for me will be when I see TransCanada's taillights cross the Canadian border, heading north." The legislature gave Gov. Dave Heineman the power to OK a revised pipeline route in 2012, after the original drew objections because it passed through ecologically delicate areas. Now, "there is no approved route across Nebraska," the plaintiffs' lawyer said. Nebraska immediately vowed to appeal, but experts tell the Washington Post that could delay a final decision on the project—which still requires White House approval—until after the November elections. "This gives the US State Department and Obama an out," a business professor tells Bloomberg. "I think he's going to push it back another year."