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> Most of this country (by area, not population) is increasingly resentful of the federal government's actions,

Land doesn’t vote.

In the US, the Senate represents land ownership well.

Though it can seem like land is given the vote when you compare the amount of influence subsides etc rural communities have compared to urban areas.

Huge swathes of land, their populations and resources shouldn’t be controlled by an out of touch city, or group of cities, just because they attract more people from all over. Land doesn’t vote but regions of people do, and those regions should dictate their own policy.

So if those huge swaths of land end up poisoning rivers, streams etc which feed into lakes that supply drinking water for the cities, who exactly should have jurisdiction?

And no this isn't a rhetorical argument, the reasons why we have these regulations is because farms will gladly dump whatever into nearby streams and destroy water supplies because it's quite literally downstream of them and this doesn't directly affect them.

This case wasn’t about a farm or rivers or lakes. It was about a lot with a ditch that someone wanted to build a house on. The EPA wanted the law to cover any property with any kind of feature to control rainwater or runoff, which is basically every piece of property in the country:

> Within a few years, the agencies had “interpreted their jurisdiction over ‘the waters of the United States’ to cover 270-to-300 million acres” of wetlands and “virtually any parcel of land containing a channel or conduit . . . through which rainwater or drainage may occasionally or intermittently flow.” Rapanos, 547 U. S., at 722 (plurality opinion).

All the court did here was rule that the law doesn’t cover ditches which might occasionally have rainwater in them. The EPA will have to go back to the older definition that includes navigable waterways, such as rivers, lakes, and seas that carry interstate or international trade, as well as the wetlands adjacent to them.

As usual, Congress retains the power to amend the law to give it a more precise definition. They could even amend it so that it does cover any random ditch that might occasionally have water in it if they wanted. Congress could have made that choice at any time in the last 50 years, but they have chosen to leave the law vague instead. If you think that the Clean Water Act _should_ be applied to every single ditch in America, then write your Representative and tell them off for not doing their job.

Ditches which ”occasionally” have ran water run through them have larger impacts on water quality and retention than wetlands. There’s all kinds of negative externalities people don’t understand are a problem or care about the problems they create, but that doesn’t make those externalities actually disappear.

> All the court did here was rule that the law doesn’t cover ditches which might occasionally have rainwater in them.

Hardly, what the court did was override both the intent of the law and people who understood what was required to implement it. It’s a perversion of the basic concept of the rule of law.

Sure, if you pollute a ditch and then the pollution runs off into a river then you you have run afoul of the Clean Water Act. But if all you’re doing is filling in a ditch with soil then you haven’t. That’s all the homeowner in this case ever did. They’re not a huge corporation dumping toxic chemicals into a river, they just filled in a ditch with soil. The ditch itself was dug by a previous owner of the property. Does the ditch count as a wetland? The court has decided that it does not.

> perversion of the basic concept of the rule of law.

You have this completely backwards. In the 70s when the CWA was created, the EPA did not consider every single ditch in America to be covered by the CWA. Congress didn’t modify the law to include every single ditch in America. They did, however, modify it in 1977 to include all “adjacent wetlands”. This was clearly intended to allow the CWA to apply to any wetland adjacent to a river or lake carrying interstate or international trade. But nobody back then thought that it covered the ditch in your back yard. It wasn’t until 2006 that the EPA started gradually expanding the scope of their activities, culminating in the present case where they are trying to assert their authority over every single place where water flows, or could flow.

The rule of law requires that people know what the law is, and it thus follows that it requires that the agencies which enforce the law may not gradually expand their definitions in order to grab more and more power. If you want the EPA to have more power, then tell your congresscritter to give it to them. Anything else is a perversion of the rule of law.

A ditch of soil alone is often a problem no separate pollution required. Bare ditches are rare to see them on untouched land on the east coast because they transport so much soil so quickly they become something else, they are only common because people create so many of them. Anyway turning a new ditch to something else involves transporting a great deal of material into waterways which at scale causes problems.

On top of this speeding up how quickly rain enters streams increases flooding etc. At an individual level it may not be obvious but collectively it can be a huge effect.

As to the bills interpretation, congress isn’t an expert on everything. They create agencies specifically to solve problems not carry out a rote script. Nobody wants the FBI having a list of specifically banned types of murder that are outlawed and if someone comes up with a new one then they’re off scot free. Instead they say arrest people who do X, and if the agency does something they don’t like congress then amends the law.

Congress has been happy to see how the EPA has followed their instructions since 2006, but suddenly these activist judges say hold up you’re not doing what congress wants… Get real they are saying this isn’t what the judges want.

Yes they should, because their very existence is heavily subsidized by those "out of touch" cities. Much in the same way as the cities depend on those rural areas for goods that can't be produced efficiently in cities, especially (but not limited to) food, and they don't want their politics governed by "out of touch" country people.

Consider being less antagonistic towards your mutual dependents.

The Senate approves judicial nominees and land very much does vote for the Senate.

No, but being geographically distant tends to encourage the development of distinct cultures, and that's what's at issue here.

I agree there is a really sad anti-hobbyist bias. The FAA are criminal in holding back anything other than incredibly big industry, but I still tend to think it's mostly negligence & scale, that they have real concerns at scale to tackle & can't allocate 20% of their resources to letting necessary clutch innovation & experimentation happen.

I do think people are broadly incredibly resentful. But I also think these critics would be enormously more interesting to listen to if they had nuance & perspective, if they could acknowledge how necessary it was that we did things like create the EPA & how important it is to safeguard & protect ourselves in a long term. So much of the dissent is pure disdain, just inchoate rage, and it's unclear that folks are worth heeding.

There is a huge propaganda network running very very effectively on rage against any governance. It has become a horrible mind poison.

I'd have to disagree on government regulation being bad.

Sure some things aren't done well, as you say hobbyists can suffer, but without regulation at scale the majority of the population suffers.

If it's not regulated, every big company will abuse whatever they can (people or otherwise) to get ahead.

I don’t agree with your conclusion, but totally grant that the reasoning is valid.

That said - I didn’t posit that all government regulation is bad in my original post in this thread. I said that weakening the power of federal agencies is likely the only path to maintaining our federal system in the long term.

While yes, my “end goal” is the dissolution of the state, I’m not naive enough to believe that could happen overnight and it be a good thing. Instead, I’d like to see government functions replaced one by one by private enterprises through natural market forces, culminating in dissolution of the state through lack of utility and interest in continuing it. That would be a multi-generational project even by the most optimistic projections.

There are no markets without regulation. Regulations make the market.

You mean "private enterprise natural forces" that result in drivers being forced to urinate in bottles, tips stolen, unionising workers essentially fired, and then list goes on?

Yeah you can stick that. Hard.

People and companies will always try to screw over the little person. Government's role is to mitigate that.

SCOTUS is gathering both legislative and executive power onto itself.

Our Constitution's balance of powers was specifically designed to curtail that.

As a long time fan of democracy and loyal citizen of the USA, I'd rather have elected representation, for all their faults, rather than a cabal of reactionary corporatists with lifetime appointment and near zero accountability, calling the shots.

But opinions differ.

Some think monarchy is just terrific. Because 2400 years ago Plato blathered about mobs and tyrants and wokeness.

> I'd rather have elected representation

I think that’s the root of the problem.

This case wasn’t about overturning a law, it was about reining in an unelected federal agency that had interpreted the law in a way that a plain reading doesn’t support.

If Congress had written the Clean Water Act in a way that authorized this position, we’d be having an entirely different conversation.

The Clean Water Act not applying to wetlands is not Alito's dumbest decision. More like tied for first place.

I volunteered for a wetlands conservation group for a decade. Only made possible by Bush 41's efforts to further codify and protect wetlands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_net_loss_wetlands_policy

The hubris of Alito et al to judge our best available science, despite having zero expertise, despite decades of policy, despite decades of scientific and methodology advances, is just bonkers.

Oh, sorry, they're just being textualists. A totally real, consistent, and in no way purely fabricated as needed case-by-case legal doctrine.

I can't wait to humor the SCOTUS' anti-textualism tortured rationalism next time they choose originalism, major doctrines, or an entirely new legal fiction to reach their predetermined outcome.

Probably next week.

You're being downvoted by people that don't really believe in democracy. They think they do, but they don't when put under the slightest bit of scrutiny.

If the argument is we share these resources and there's externalities, I'd ask why not focus on getting BRICS to pass your policies first? It will have a much greater impact than what can be done in the US. If you can't get BRICS to pass your policies, then what is the point? If the argument is that we can at least make a small impact locally, why not extend that reasoning further to allow the people in each state, and the people in each municipality to decide?

I look forward to the rebuttals given some countries are already excluded from participating in the G7.