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Half of US wetlands lost federal protection. Their fate is up to the states

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Re: Half of US wetlands lost federal protection. Their fate is up to the states

#71

Post by User23 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #68
bcrosby95 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, I believe that federal government could actually argue that the random wetlands actually can be under its jurisdiction, if they affect the water in other states, eg. through ground water flows etc. However, they will need to pass a new law to assert that, instead of leaning on old law that clearly did not mean to cover this. You can also raise the counterpoint here: 45 years of precedent says they're included,…

> 45 years of precedent says they're included Not quite. As recently as in 2006, Rapanos decided "the CWA’s use of 'waters' encompasses 'only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water ‘forming geographic[al] features’ that are described in ordinary parlance as ‘streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes.’" Also: "More recently, the agencies have engaged in a flurry of rulemaking defining 't…

This reminds me of how a court declared that San Diego's overgrown drainage system was a protected wetland and they had to offset it in order to dredge it out and keep a century flood from happening.

Re: Half of US wetlands lost federal protection. Their fate is up to the states

#72

Post by hinkley »

In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer waxes poetic about the pharmacopia contained in marsh plants. Cattails alone have a ton of stuff going on. If you live in anaerobic rot your whole life you gotta have some good anti-microbials going on. It's practically the aloe vera of wetlands. Or maybe aloe vera is the cattails of drylands.

There's a lot of other reasons to protect wetlands. The tiny little one I was involved with was the water fountain for all of the local pollinators. Water access in the middle of the summer in the PNW is a serious challenge. It was one of the first times I encountered bees and wasps who were too busy doing their thing to even care that I was there.

Re: Half of US wetlands lost federal protection. Their fate is up to the states

#73

Post by JumpCrisscross »

thomasahle wrote: post #39
ars wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This decision made no sense to begin with since Again, if Congress wanted to fix this, they have the authority. The decision simply said they have not yet actually done so.

I'm trying to understand if the people saying "congress can just fix this" every time the supreme court makes a ruling, a) Don't agree that congress is blocked and is never going to pass anything. b) Care more about the legalities than the issues themselves, and so don't really care about whether there is a plausible way through congress. c) Are making a cry for help for everyone to come together to fix congress. Hop…

> trying to understand if the people saying "congress can just fix this" every time the supreme court makes a ruling

Because it's what the current Court is saying. They're pushing back against Chevron's deference to agency rule making.

Congress didn't say a thing, agencies wrote a rule, the courts deferred; SCOTUS is saying that last part was incorrect, the agencies never had the power to write that rule. Congress needed to do it.

Re: Half of US wetlands lost federal protection. Their fate is up to the states

#74

Post by HDThoreaun »

thomasahle wrote: post #39
ars wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This decision made no sense to begin with since Again, if Congress wanted to fix this, they have the authority. The decision simply said they have not yet actually done so.

I'm trying to understand if the people saying "congress can just fix this" every time the supreme court makes a ruling, a) Don't agree that congress is blocked and is never going to pass anything. b) Care more about the legalities than the issues themselves, and so don't really care about whether there is a plausible way through congress. c) Are making a cry for help for everyone to come together to fix congress. Hop…

I think c is legitimate. Our federal institutions are breaking down due to the public’s mistrust of congress. Its a completely broken institution and both parties are relying on that fact to move toward a more culture war based platform instead of talking about policy, since everyone knows there will be no policy.

Re: Half of US wetlands lost federal protection. Their fate is up to the states

#75

Post by Retric »

nostromo wrote: post #65
cmh89 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's what the judiciary is for. Right, and the judiciary has 45 years of precedent that the wetlands are included. This radicalized illegitmate SCOTUS just threw out the protections because their corporate owners benefit from it.

The whole point of a supreme court is to set precedent, as they have with many other decisions that you probably like, like Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell v. Hodges. Besides, laws matter. If you want something done, you have to pass a law. If you don't have the votes, then go do the work and convince more people to vote with you. Edit: it actually wasn't set precedent from the supreme court anyway. The pr…

No every level sets precedent, making precedent is a side effect not their role.

Historically only a small fraction of Supreme Court cases have overturned precedent without a conflict at lower levels.

Re: Half of US wetlands lost federal protection. Their fate is up to the states

#76

Post by JumpCrisscross »

mullingitover wrote: post #36
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> issue of "wetlands" as you put it actually came up while congress was drafting the laws, and congress specifically wrote the law to cover them. The Supreme Court just ignored this because it felt like it This is a bad reading of the opinion. Wetlands were broadly undefined in statute.

Statutes are frequently written in vague terms with the intent of having the executive branch make a reasonable interpretation, e.g. the rule-making body says "The park shall be kept clean and well maintained," and the executive branch comes up with their interpretation. Problems can arise when people with wealth and money at stake take issue with the executive branch's interpretation. They can do things like take ju…

> Statutes are frequently written in vague terms with the intent of having the executive branch make a reasonable interpretation

Page 6 of the Opinion [1] does a good job summarizing what Congress wrote, what it meant at the time, how it was amended by the courts and agencies over the years, and how it's changed since 2015. Nothing appears to be corruptly constructed.

[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-454_4g15.pdf

Re: Half of US wetlands lost federal protection. Their fate is up to the states

#77

Post by saalweachter »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #52
saalweachter wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this really the case? I can look up a map of what the State and Federal government consider a wetland on my property. If I need to do eg construction within 100 feet of such an area on the map, I'm supposed to call in the local DEC and they -- for free -- come in and tell me the boundaries of the wetland based on local vegetation. Isn't that how it works everywhere?

> Is this really the case? Yes. The Army Corps of Engineers "controls permits for the discharge of dredged or fill material into covered waters... The costs of obtaining such a permit are 'significant,' and both agencies have admitted that 'the permitting process can be arduous, expensive, and long.' ...Success is also far from guaranteed, as the Corps has asserted discretion to grant or deny permits based on a long,…

> Namely, the government wouldn’t tell you if your property was a wetland until after it thought you’d violated the law.

Re: Half of US wetlands lost federal protection. Their fate is up to the states

#78

Post by ralusek »

Retric wrote: post #69
zdragnar wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congress shouldn't have to constantly pass laws just to tell the executive branch that they are abusing their powers. That's what the judiciary is for. My uncle has a small stream running through his back yard, counted as "navigable water" despite the fact that I could jump across it as a child and it wasn't deep enough to support anything but a paper boat. I'm also not saying we shouldn't have protections for the en…

> constantly ass laws just to tell the executive branch they are abusing their powers. Nobody is suggesting that. The basic argument is if both the executive and the judiciary misinterpret a law for decades then it’s the legislative branch’s job to correct that “misunderstanding” not the judiciary. This is why it’s called a common law, past court cases clarify the rules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law When…

> arbitrarily change the rules after it’s already made up its mind.

It is often the precedent which was arbitrary.

Re: Half of US wetlands lost federal protection. Their fate is up to the states

#79

Post by HDThoreaun »

gman83 wrote: post #31

I don't understand how the Supreme Court came up with this "continuous surface connection" definition. Can they just make up such definitions on their own?

It’s from the law. The EPA is the one that made up the definition of wetlands to include ones that weren’t navigable as required by the law.

But yes, they can just make up definitions if they want. The NYC may issue gun law case from last year had that with the infamous “historical tradition of firearm regulation” ruling. We have a common law system which means that judicial rulings from federal appellate courts are law in their jurisdiction. The only thing stopping them I guess is the fear of another Andrew Jackson deciding they’re illegitimate and ignoring them.

Re: Half of US wetlands lost federal protection. Their fate is up to the states

#80

Post by throwaway914 »

I don't like this at all. We need a gov that proactively protects these things we'll only have once. We cannot suffer the changing opinions of even supreme court justices. Whether I believe in the legitimacy of this decision or not, we will only have these lands once. We cannot invest in the time scale to create them from scratch. It just won't happen with the lack of unity governing a country of this size, especially when some over-represented minorities want to actively harm our natural resources. We keep destroying entire ecosystems. We'll never fully appreciate what John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt did for national parks, for example.

I fear these lands will just become bargain chips, held hostage, to push through terrible interests elsewhere.

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