I told you I would read it and I did and it basically comes down to the permissible definition of adjacent wetlands to navigable waters. The decision basically is just an exercise in dictionary reading. They discussed the whole history of navigable waters which became waters of the United States in the Clean Water Act. So the decision came down to whether or not the EPA’s definition of adjacent, which included any neighboring wetlands was a permissible interpretation of the statute. So you understand the breadth of the EPA’s asserted definition, the next paragraph is directly quoted from the decision.
“According to the EPA, the “wetlands” on the Sacketts’ lot are “adjacent to” (in the sense that they are in the same neighborhood as) what it described as an “unnamed tributary” on the other side of a 30-foot road. App. 33. That tributary feeds into a non-navigable creek, which, in turn, feeds into Priest Lake, an intrastate body of water that the EPA designated as traditionally navigable. To establish a significant nexus, the EPA lumped the Sacketts’ lot together with the Kalispell Bay Fen, a large nearby wetland complex that the Agency regarded as “similarly situated.” According to the EPA, these properties, taken together, “significantly affect” the ecology of Priest Lake. Therefore, the EPA concluded, the Sacketts had illegally dumped soil and gravel onto “the waters of the United States.”
The court held that adjacent wetlands only applied to wetlands that were continuously connected to traditional navigable waters so basically you can’t tell where one ends and the other starts and therefore the Sacketts won as should be obvious from the above quote, and it was a 9-0 decision. There were a few concurring opinions and interestingly Sotomayor wrote a concurrence in which Kavanaugh concurred in which they concluded that adjacent means next to like the house next door and would include a wetland separated by a highway from a river even though there is no connection. I think that’s stupid but fortunately it’s not the law.
I have a little pond in my backyard yard that is not directly connected to the neuse river. It gets bigger or smaller depending on rainfall but is only directly connected to the Neuse during flooding, so it’s not covered by the CWA but would be by the Sotomayor definition.
Now why is this decision important. It’s another blow to Chevron deference which this court has been steadily chipping away at. I have ranted about this concept previously but it’s basically the concept that courts should defer to agency expertise when interpreting vague statutory language. As I have previously mentioned, it’s based on a false premise, namely that agencies have supposed expertise. Just look at Magoo’s cabinet and tell me which of them are even remotely qualified.
Previously the SC, not this one but an earlier SC, had struck down an EPA regulation that attempted to tie waters of the US to the migratory birds law so that any water that a migratory bird landed in became property of the US. So if a duck or goose landed in your pool or koi pond or your bird bath the feds owned it.
I was hoping to see Chevron deference mentioned and it wasn’t, but the Court explicitly rejected EPA’s claim that the Court should defer to their definition. Another step forward in reigning in the administrative state. Hopefully soon they will flat out declare that agencies are entitled to no deference!
If you want to read the opinion the cite is below, and like all official SC decisions there is a syllabus up front that’s I think six pages long.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-454_4g15.pdf