8/15/2023 0 Comments Supreme court latest decisionsAnthony Kennedy, who was the party of one, determined that there had to be a "significant nexus" connecting the two, a phrase that was also a subject of continual debate.Īgainst that backdrop, the relevant federal agencies (the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers) have pursued rulemaking under different interpretations of "significant nexus," with more expansive ones prevailing under Democratic presidencies. In one of the more relevant cases, the court had a 4-4-1 split regarding the issue of whether wetlands without a direct connection to open waters were subject to regulation. Several geographic features-seasonal streams, human-made water features, and marshlands without a direct connection to rivers-have all been subject to dispute.Įven the Supreme Court found the issue difficult. Its text applies regulations to the "waters of the United States," a term that has proven sufficiently vague that it has been the subject of various lawsuits and federal regulatory policies over the years. The Clean Water Act was a major piece of environmental regulation due to the sometimes horrific pollution prevalent in the early 1970s. But there was a very sharply worded 5-4 disagreement over what the word "adjacent" means. The decision is a somewhat unusual one in that all nine justices agree that the people who originally sued the EPA should prevail. ![]() This would remove many wetlands separated by small strips of land-including artificial structures like levees-from oversight by the EPA. The ruling applies to wetlands that are connected to bodies of water that fall under the Clean Water Act's regulatory scheme, with the court now ruling that those connections need to be direct and contiguous for the act to apply. On Thursday, the US Supreme Court issued a ruling that severely limits the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate pollution under the Clean Water Act. ![]() Sam Sankar, a lawyer at environmental group Earthjustice said up to 90 million acres of formerly protected wetlands could now be under threat.Stefano Madrigali reader comments 176 with In Thursday's ruling, the court rejected the significant nexus test and appeared to embrace the approach taken by the four-justice bloc in the 2006 case. Successive presidential administrations have sought to bring clarity to the law, with Democrats generally favoring greater federal power and Republicans, backed by business interests, saying that Clean Water Act jurisdiction should be limited. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who provided the fifth vote in that 5-4 ruling, came up with his own test, which said the law provided jurisdiction over wetlands with a “significant nexus” to a waterway. In 2006, four justices said the Clean Water Act covered wetland with a “continuous surface connection” to a waterway, but there was not a clear majority. The law on how to define a wetland - of key interest to property developers and other business interests - has long been muddled and was not resolved when the Supreme Court decided an earlier case on the issue. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, ruled in August 2021 in favor of the federal government in its determination that the area did constitute a wetland. ![]() The Sacketts returned to the Supreme Court after the 9th U.S. The fight, which began in 2007, continued over whether the land was a wetland at all. The legal dispute focused on whether the Sacketts could challenge an EPA compliance order in court after they had filled the affected area with gravel and sand without obtaining a permit. Both cases involve the same underlying dispute: their effort to build a property on land they own in Priest Lake, Idaho, parts of which the EPA has deemed a protected wetland, meaning the land is subject to federal jurisdiction and building on it requires a permit. The case saw the Sacketts return to the Supreme Court for the second time after the justices ruled in their favor in an earlier case in 2012. "The vice in both instances is the same: the court's appointment of itself as the national decision-maker on environmental policy," she said.
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