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Comment by ars | Hacker News Reader

This quote is just stupid: "Where the Supreme Court is tying the hands of the federal government". Congress could, if they actually wanted to, pass a law that would regulate these lands.

All the the Supreme Court did is rule that, at least so far, congress has not done so.

And yet somehow this is the Supreme Court's fault.

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Congress did in fact change the law to specify that those areas were regulated. In the past. After the last time people complained that it should only be surface connections they changed the law to make it more explicit that was not the intent. The Supreme Court completely ignored that.

It is simply not true that congress revised this law.

The Clean Water Act was amended in in 1977 to add the phrase "adjacent wetlands" specifically because of contention on this point. This was after the Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA had fought and settled into an agreement on definitions and policy stemming the previous version and that understanding was known and referenced by congress during argument. The congressional research document which traces the history of this has already been linked on this post but I'll reiterate it here: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44585

If you want to jump straight to the punchline, this is from the section on United States v. Riverside Bayview Homes, Inc in which the Supreme Court made clear that they were aware of this context and informed their ruling taking it into account: The Court also cited legislative history from the passage of the Clean Water Act and the amendments in 1977—in which the term “adjacent wetlands” was added to the statute107—as support for its conclusion that Congress intended for the Clean Water Act to have a broad jurisdictional reach which included the adjacent wetlands at issue.108 In concluding that adjacent wetlands could reasonably be covered, however, the Court also emphasized that it did not express any opinion on the Corps’ authority to regulate discharges of fill material into wetlands that are not adjacent to bodies of open water.109

And the court listened to that, and decided that unconnected waters are not "adjacent". The OP claimed they ignored congress but that is not correct.

> The Supreme Court completely ignored that.

Yah, sorry, but I don't believe you. The Supreme Court just doesn't do that.

Let me see some sources to support what you are saying.

See my reply to justrealist's sibling comment to yours.

Congress passed the Clean Water Act which literally included "estuarine zones". The Supreme Court cynically said Congress hadn't meant wetlands with that synonym. So yeah, the Supreme Court or Alito, Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch and Barrett are at fault.

BTW, the opinion literally quotes the term "estuarine waters" which is a phrase never used in the Clean Water Act. Basically, the majority opinion is lying.

> So yeah, the Supreme Court or Alito, Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch and Barrett are at fault.

You forgot Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. The decision was unanimous.

The 2023 case Sackett v. EPA II narrowing the Environmental Protection Act to not include wetlands was decided 5-4.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sackett_v._Environmental_Prote...

Not exactly: "The court voted unanimously to reverse the Ninth Circuit, but split 5–4 on the rationale."

>> the opinion literally quotes the term "estuarine waters" which is a phrase never used in the Clean Water Act

The opinion cites §1330(g)(4)(C)(vii) ("estuarine waters"), looks like that is from an amendment to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (which is the official name for the Clean Water Act), https://www.govinfo.gov/bulkdata/PLAW/114/public/PLAW-114pub...:

"To amend the Federal Water Pollution Control Act to reauthorize the National Estuary Program, and for other purposes"

...

"(vii) low dissolved oxygen conditions in estuarine waters and related nutrient management."

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