Supreme Court rules against EPA in dispute over regulating wetlands

[Novara]

48. This is an excellent summary why this is such a horrible decision

This decision may be narrow, but it sets precedent which can be (and likely will be) used to create a more expansive decision which will threaten drinking water sources.

This article better explains how I consider this decision: The Supreme Court just gutted the Clean Water Act. It could be devastating.

In a unanimous opinion for the court almost 40 years ago, Justice Byron White explained why. While acknowledging that “on a purely linguistic level, it may appear unreasonable to classify ‘lands’ wet or otherwise as ‘waters,’” the court said “such a simplistic response … does justice neither to the problem faced by the [government] nor to the realities of the problem of water pollution that the Clean Water Act was intended to combat.”

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s opinion in Sackett, however, embraces the very “simplistic response” that the court rightly criticized in 1985. Relying on a dictionary definition of “waters” and ignoring the Clean Water Act’s purpose, the court’s conservative majority has adopted a radically truncated view of the reach of the law’s restriction on water pollution. Under the court’s new view, pollution requires a permit only if it is discharged into waters that are “relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water, ‘forming geographic[al] features’ that are described in ordinary parlance as ‘streams … oceans, rivers, and lakes.’” And “wetlands” are covered only if they are “indistinguishably part” of those narrowly defined covered waters.

This is exactly what Scalia wanted to accomplish in 2006 when the Clean Water Act was last before the court. He managed to cobble together three other votes to gut the law but fell one justice short. Now, with six conservative justices — three of whom are largely modeled in Scalia’s image — Alito was able to accomplish what Scalia never could by securing the necessary fifth vote.

The impact of the majority ruling is potentially enormous. It could lead to the removal of millions of miles of streams and millions of acres of wetlands from the law’s direct protection. Basic protections necessary to ensure clean, healthy water for human consumption and enjoyment will be lost. As highlighted by Justice Elena Kagan’s separate opinion, the court’s opinion “prevents the EPA from keeping our country’s waters clean by regulating adjacent wetlands.”

With a dictionary definition of "waters" and no scientific knowledge of hydrology and topology, Alito cemented a future of contaminated drinking water and destroyed ecosystems. Wetlands feed not only into lakes and streams, but the water table, which, in a hell of a lot of this country, is tapped for drinking water. Stripping protections from wetlands essentially means contamination of drinking water sources. And don't forget threatening the ecosystems that thrive in clean wetlands. Imagine something like the everglades in Florida, and its entire ecosystem. Wetlands are found along the coasts, along rivers, inland in low-lying areas, and
a third of all threatened and endangered species live exclusively in wetlands.