The Supreme Court ruling that EPA can't protect wetlands not tied to streams

Rural Blog - The U.S. Supreme Court ended one of the longest battles over the Clean Water Act Thursday, ruling 5-4 that the Environmental Protection Agency's power to protect wetlands does not extend as far as the high court said it did in another narrow decision 17 years ago...  At issue was the act's phrase "waters of the United States," or WOTUS, which the court said in 2006 could be regulated if they had a "significant nexus" to nearby waterways. Thursday, in an opinion written by highly conservative Justice Samuel Alito, the court said WOTUS "extends to only those wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are 'waters of the United States' in their own right so that they are 'indistinguishable' from those waters." Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett joined the opinion.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh dissented, saying the Army Corps of Engineers “has always included in the definition of ‘adjacent wetlands’ not only wetlands adjoining covered waters but also those wetlands that are separated from covered waters by a manmade dike or barrier, natural river berm, beach dune, or the like. . . . We should not create ambiguity where none exists. And we may not rewrite ‘adjacent’ to mean the same thing as ‘adjoining,’ as the Court does today.”