|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
The story of the Clean Waters Act is a perfect example of the administrative state seizing total power that it was never intended to have.
The old 70’s legislation protected “navigable waters” also known as “waters of the United States”. The EPA’s bureaucrats and eco-leftists decided to take the latter definition to mean all the water. Literally.
Got a puddle in your backyard? The EPA has authority over it. Or had authority.
The Supreme Court ruled that “waters refers only to “geographic[al] features that are described in ordinary parlance as ‘streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes’ ” and to adjacent wetlands that are “indistinguishable” from those bodies of water due to a continuous surface connection.”
Wetlands are not navigable waters at all, but at least this curtails the escalating Obama/Biden abuses of the CWA.
The SCOTUS ruling states that, “to assert jurisdiction over an adjacent wetland under the CWA, a party must establish “first, that the adjacent [body of water constitutes] . . . ‘water[s] of the United States’ (i.e., a relatively permanent body of water connected to traditional interstate navigable waters); and second, that the wetland has a continuous surface connection with that water, making it difficult to determine where the ‘water’ ends and the ‘wetland’ begins.”
In short, the EPA can’t simply claim that all water is connected and any water on your property will eventually make its way to a navigable body of the water and so it can tell you not to build on your own land.
Justice Alito casually takes apart the EPA’s argument.
“The EPA argues that ‘waters’ is ‘naturally read to encompass wetlands’ because the “presence of water is ‘universally regarded as the most basic feature of wetlands.’”
He points out that, “it is also instructive that the CWA expressly ‘protect[s] the primary responsibilities and rights of States to prevent, reduce, and eliminate pollution’ and ‘to plan the development and use . . . of land and water resources.'”
“It is hard to see how the States’ role in regulating water resources would remain ‘primary’ if the EPA had jurisdiction over anything defined by the presence of water.”
There is no possible response to this. The EPA chose to ignore the law to seize power, as the administrative state often does.
“Field agents brought nearly all waters and wetlands under the risk of CWA jurisdiction by engaging in fact-intensive ‘significant-nexus’ determinations that turned on a lengthy list of hydrological and ecological factors.”
This is part of a pattern.
Justice Alito notes also that the “’migratory bird rule,’ which extended jurisdiction to any waters or wetlands that ‘are or would be used as [a] habitat’ by migratory birds or endangered species. See 53 Fed. Reg. 20765 (1988); 51 Fed. Reg. 41217 (1986). As the Corps would later admit, ‘nearly all waters were jurisdictional under the migratory bird rule.’”
The EPA’s authority over your puddles have been rolled back, but nearly every other good SCOTUS decision involves some sort of idiotic dissent by Kavanaugh or Gorsuch, and this is no exception with Kavanaugh writing a dissent complaining that the decision dismantles the CWA when what it actually does is reaffirm the actual law while rolling back the power grab of the administrative state.
You go, Clarence Thomas. Put the Commerce Clause back in its box!
Good news for that couple in Idaho The Sacketts who was being threatened with heavy and Unconstitutional Fines by the EPA for violating the CWA good news for a Rancher whos Stock Ponds Benefit Wildlife as well as the Livestock. But the Eco-Freaks will be upset
Insane from a practical point of view. How is a person supposed to clean up his property if the government has jurisdiction of every little pond?
Just thinking locally, birds are liable to drink from any available water.
There is a small stream nearby that is hardly navigable.
Again it is Beria: “Show me the man, I’ll show you the crime.” One has to keep a low profile so as not to be investigated, as otherwise water violations are liable to be found.
Oh, and what about creeks flowing underground? That may even once have been above ground?
Most of the Mojave river is underground. I’ve been to its wellspring many times, and lolled in its waters downriver where it’s broad and shallow near its source and narrows and deepens farther down. I drank from it, too. It tasted good.
Forget ponds, AA, they’ve claimed jurisdiction of every puddle, and made it stick in some cases with people who couldn’t afford a legal battle.
If ‘climate change’ was a real problem, and if they were really concerned about methane, they’d be draining swamps and clearing triple canopy jungles, instead of protecting them. They generate far more methane than ruminants (cud chewers).
Uh oh. It appears they may have released the whirlwind, will pay the price, and won’t know what hit them!
Even the non-biologist pick of Jojo Cabbage Brain Biden is now MAGA, despite not understanding what a “woman” is.
If they want to pack the court, they need ten new justices, not the four that Shifty Schiff just emailed me about.
So the government’s position was that “the “presence of water is ‘universally regarded as the most basic feature of wetlands.’” Gee, I had no idea they were asserting jurisdiction over my basement. Who knew?
What SCOTUS might giveth on one day it also taketh away with interest the next. Actually, it already did that for those playing the long game.
My company had a run in with a city water official. We run waterjets, which have multistage water filtration going in, and drain from the top of the tank, so the waste water is very clean. The aluminum we cut falls to the bottom of the tank along with the garnet cutting media(which is about as inert as it gets). The owner, on his own innitiative, even designed and built a post tank filtration system that was easy to maintain and did work. This guy made us buy and install an $80k evaporator, that doesn’t really work(I’m just thankful it doesn’t pollute-if it worked ‘better,’ it probably would be a bacteria farm).
Meanwhile, next to us is a lot with retired fleet lubricant vehicles and tanks dating back to the late 60s, rotting away. It costs bureaucrats and academics nothing when they’re wrong, so the real learning process rarely occurrs, and being politically connected is all that matters.