The nation’s highest court has agreed to hear 27 arguments so far – roughly half its caseload for the term that will end in June 2023.
The Conservative majority on the Supreme Court is wasting no time in weighing another challenge to one of the nation’s bedrock environmental laws when it begins its new term on Monday.
The court will hear oral arguments Monday morning in a closely watched challenge to the Clean Water Act, passed in 1972 to protect all “waters of the United States”— including streams, rivers, lakes, and wetlands – from harmful pollution.
The court will also be hearing arguments on quite a number of divisive issues this term, including affirmative action, voting rights, elections, and LGBTQ discrimination, cases that may end up showcasing the power of the court’s six-justice conservative majority, according to CBS News.
“I don’t think it’s going to be a sleepy sort of Supreme Court term,” Allison Orr Larsen, a professor at William & Mary Law School, told CBS News. “The cases they’ve taken are ideologically charged, and there’s probably going to be even more divisive questions they have to answer about the Second Amendment and abortion fights all in the wake of their big decisions the last term. There’s no evidence yet that this court is going to pump the brakes on deciding high-profile, divisive issues anytime soon.”
Sackett v. EPA may be the nation’s most serious attack on Clean Water Act
The Supreme Court has struggled for years to define a key term at the heart of the Clean Water Act, the landmark 1972 legislation that forms the backbone of America’s efforts to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters.”
The Clean Water Act prohibits the “discharge of pollutants” into “navigable waters.” However, the act also defines the term “navigable waters” vaguely and counterintuitively, to include all “waters of the United States, including the territorial seas.”
This clause has been challenged by businesses and home builders who argue that legal confusion over the definition of “waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, has created regulatory chaos’
In Rapanos v. United States in 2006, the key phrase “waters of the United States,” was the stickler that caused the justices to split three ways, with no one approach winning majority approval from the Court.
Now, Sackett v. EPA brings this question to a Court that has moved dramatically to the right after former President Donald Trump filled a third of its seats. The case centers on a long-running dispute involving an Idaho couple named Chantell and Michael Sackett.
To make a long story short, in 2007, the couple tried to build a home on their land near Idaho’s Priest Lake. However, the EPA determined that the property contained a wetland and that the couple needed to obtain a Clean Water Act permit or face heavy fines.
The Pacific Legal Foundation is representing the Sacketts. They are calling on the justices to significantly narrow the definition of “waters of the United States” so that the Sacketts’ property — and others like it — would not be subject to the Clean Water Act.
The PLF has come up with a reading of the Clean Water Act that is more restrictive. According to their brief, the “waters of the United States” are “limited to traditional navigable waters and intrastate navigable waters that link with other modes of transport to form interstate channels of commerce.”
The bottom line, in this case, is simple: If that approach prevails, huge numbers of streams, drainage ditches, and other small tributaries that may flow into major bodies of water — but that are not themselves large enough to be navigated by ships and other watercraft — could abruptly lose the Clean Water Act’s protections.
“This decision will be nothing short of a life-or-death sentence for coho salmon, razorback suckers, California tiger salamanders, and hundreds of other endangered animals that rely on ephemeral and intermittently flowing streams and wetlands,” Hannah Connor, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement, reports the Washington Post.
