Supreme Court Limits EPA Power on Water Pollution

Majority sides with couple who sought to build home on wetlands in Idaho
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted May 25, 2023 11:30 AM CDT
Supreme Court Limits EPA Power on Water Pollution
Michael and Chantell Sackett of Priest Lake, Idaho, pose for a photo in front of the Supreme Court in Washington on Oct. 14, 2011.   (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari, File)

The Supreme Court on Thursday made it harder for the federal government to police water pollution in a decision that strips protections from wetlands that are isolated from larger bodies of water, per the AP. It's the second decision in as many years in which a conservative majority of the court narrowed the reach of environmental regulations. The justices boosted property rights over concerns about clean water in a ruling in favor of an Idaho couple who sought to build a house near Priest Lake in the state’s panhandle. Chantell and Michael Sackett objected when federal officials identified a soggy portion of the property as a wetlands that required them to get a permit before building.

By a 5-4 vote, the court said in an opinion by Justice Samuel Alito that wetlands can only be regulated under the Clean Water Act if they have a “continuous surface connection” to larger, regulated bodies of water. There is no such connection on the Sacketts’ property. The court jettisoned the 17-year-old opinion by their former colleague, Anthony Kennedy, allowing regulation of wetlands that have a “significant nexus” to the larger waterways. Kennedy's opinion had been the standard for evaluating whether wetlands were covered under the 1972 landmark environmental law. Opponents had objected that the standard was vague and unworkable.

In Thursday's ruling, all nine justices agreed that the wetlands on the Sacketts’ property are not covered by the Clean Water Act. But only five justices joined in the opinion that imposed a new test for evaluating when wetlands are covered by the act. Conservative Brett Kavanaugh and the court’s three liberal justices charged that their colleagues had rewritten the act. Kavanaugh wrote that the court’s “new and overly narrow test may leave long-regulated and long-accepted-to-be regulable wetlands suddenly beyond the scope of the agencies’ regulatory authority.” He cited efforts to control flooding on the Mississippi River and protect the Chesapeake Bay as two projects that could be threatened by the decision.

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Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the majority’s rewriting of the act was “an effort to cabin the anti-pollution actions Congress thought appropriate.” Kagan referenced last year's decision limiting the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act. In both cases, she noted, the court had appointed “itself as the national decision-maker on environmental policy.” Reacting to the decision, Manish Bapna, the chief executive of the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, called on Congress to amend the Clean Water Act to restore wetlands protections and on states to strengthen their own laws.

(More US Supreme Court stories.)

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