The ruling upholds a law that had allowed Republican Gov. Dave Heineman to approve the pipeline’s route in Nebraska. POLITICO PRO House votes to fast-track Keystone XL pipeline

The House voted Friday to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, seizing on the momentum from a Nebraska Supreme Court ruling hours earlier that removed the last major legal obstacle to building the politically charged oil project.

Now the action moves to the Senate, which will take up its version of the Keystone bill next week. Taken together, the vote on the Hill and the court decision will put the issue squarely in the hands of President Barack Obama, who has put off making a decision on the Canada-to-U.S. oil artery during his six years in the White House.


In the legal ruling early Friday that rejected arguments from three anti-Keystone landowners, the Nebraska justices upheld a 2012 state law that allowed Republican Gov. Dave Heineman — rather than an independent commission — to approve Keystone’s route inside the state. That will let the State Department resume its almost-completed review of the pipeline, which the department halted in April amid uncertainty about the Nebraska case.

State Department officials have indicated it could still take months for Secretary John Kerry to offer his own judgment on whether building Keystone would be in the interests of the United States. Obama would have no deadline to make a final decision.

But environmentalists who have fought the pipeline for the past six years, savaging its projected 700,000-plus barrels of daily Canadian oil imports as anathema to the White House’s climate agenda, immediately vowed to ramp up the pressure on Obama and Kerry to say no. They pointed to an impassioned speech Kerry gave in December at a global climate conference in Lima, Peru, where he called global warming “everybody’s responsibility” and said that “if you’re a big developed nation and you’re not helping to lead, then you are part of the problem.”

“We are confident the President will stand with farmers, ranchers and tribal communities and reject Keystone XL once and for all,” said Bold Nebraska founder Jane Kleeb, whose group leads the anti-pipeline charge in the state. She said by email that the ruling “does clear the way for the State Department to complete their analysis and for federal agencies to weigh in on risks to water and climate. ”

Congress, meanwhile, is already moving to end the debate and greenlight the pipeline on its own, with 266 House members voting to approve the project, including 28 Democrats. The Senate set to take up its version of the bill next week.

“President Obama is now out of excuses for blocking the Keystone pipeline and the thousands of American jobs it would create,” House Speaker John Boehner said in a statement after the Nebraska ruling. “Finally, it’s time to start building.”

But the White House reiterated on Friday that Obama would veto the legislation, despite the elimination of the Nebraska case, which it had repeatedly cited to argue that it’s premature for Congress to step in.

“The State Department is examining the court’s decision as part of its process,” White House deputy press secretary Eric Schultz said in a statement. “As we have made clear, we are going to let that process play out. Regardless of the Nebraska ruling today, the House bill still conflicts with longstanding executive branch procedures regarding the authority of the president and prevents the thorough consideration of complex issues that could bear on U.S. national interests, and if presented to the President, he will veto the bill.”

Supporters of the bill don’t yet have the 67 Senate votes they would need to override a veto and have been scrambling to find the last few Democratic senators willing to push the legislation over the top.

Keystone supporters have long discounted the Nebraska case as a distraction that merely gave the administration an excuse to punt the decision past the midterm elections.

“President Obama needs to show leadership and say yes to middle class jobs and no to radical fringes who want to deprive all Americans of the stable and reliable fuels they need to power their daily lives,” American Petroleum Institute CEO Jack Gerard said in a statement on the Nebraska decision.

The pipeline would fill a 1,179-mile missing link to connect Alberta’s oil fields and the Gulf Coast’s refineries, a step that State Department studies have said would create thousands of construction jobs, and which supporters say would move North America closer to energy independence. But climate activists say it would encourage a disastrous surge of greenhouse gas pollution from western Canada’s oil sands, and Obama’s recent public comments have been increasingly dismissive of the notion that the U.S. would gain much from building the pipeline.

“It’s not going to push down gas prices here in the United States,” Obama told television host Stephen Colbert in an interview in December. “It’s good for Canada. It could create a couple thousand jobs in the initial construction of the pipeline. But we’ve got to measure that against whether or not it is going to contribute to an overall warming of the planet that could be disastrous.”

The three Nebraska landowners in Friday’s case won the lawsuit’s first round in February, when a judge ruled that the state’s elected Public Service Commission — not Heineman — has the power to rule on the route for Keystone. If that ruling had held, Keystone developer TransCanada would have had to file a fresh application with the commission, which could have taken seven months to a year to decide.

The landowners were represented by David Domina, the Democrat who lost to Republican Ben Sasse in November’s election to replace former GOP Sen. Mike Johanns.

While four judges on the Nebraska court’s seven-member panel aligned with the lower court in finding the 2012 routing law unconstitutional, a supermajority of five was required to invalidate the law.

In contrast to the major political debate Keystone has spawned about jobs, energy and the fate of the planet, the Nebraska case hinged on narrower questions of state law, including whether Keystone would be considered a “common carrier” like a railroad or telephone line, and whether the landowners had the legal standing to sue. The justices dwelt at length on the question of standing in their oral arguments in September.

On Friday, three of the seven justices declined to address the constitutionality of the law at issue because they disagreed with the majority on the standing question — effectively dooming the landowners’ case. Attorneys for the landowners suggested in a Friday briefing that the court’s four-vote majority support for finding the pipeline route unconstitutional could strengthen their case for further legal challenges to Keystone.

With Friday’s ruling effectively settling the pipeline’s path through Nebraska, the State Department has little obvious reason to keep delaying a final recommendation to Obama. How fast the department completes that review may depend on whether the White House pushes it to fast-forward through the process’ final stage, which once was expected to include a new public hearing on the project.

The State Department’s environmental studies, including a final one issued in January 2014, found that the pipeline would have little impact on climate change because Canada will keep producing oil regardless of whether Keystone is built. But the department’s broader “national interest” determination is expected to consider a broader set of issues, including the economy, energy security and U.S. relations with Canada.

Obama’s role in the process is somewhat shadowy, even though as a political matter the buck stops at his desk.

A 2004 executive order that governs cross-border pipeline approvals gives eight agencies, including EPA, room to register disagreements that could prolong the State Department’s review. The same executive order says the secretary of state makes the final decision unless one of those eight agencies disagrees, in which case the matter goes to the president. But for Keystone, Obama has said he’ll make the final call on a controversy that remains deeply symbolic to the environmental community.

A final approval of Keystone is not guaranteed to quiet the green resistance that has hummed outside the Beltway even as the pipeline faded from the top of Washington’s energy agenda before the midterm elections. Environmental groups are likely to challenge any pipeline permit in court, and Nebraska landowners as well as more radical climate activists have vowed to stage acts of civil disobedience aimed at disrupting Keystone’s construction.