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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

#81

Post by Retric »

ralusek wrote: post #78
Retric wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure, but that’s not an inherent issue. If things are arbitrary and you decide based on a coin flip then the coin flip needs to be binding or you just keep flipping coins.

There’s many other systems we could use, but existing case law has the benefit of being extremely detailed. If navigable waterways in your state is public land, what happens after a dam is installed and they’re no longer navigable? That’s the kind of thing you want to find out before you buy some property.

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

#82

Post by ralusek »

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 gladly choose option b. The rule of law is a meta-principle, and is much more important than any individual issue. Allowing arbitrary execution of authority in favor of an issue you care about is a recipe for authoritarianism.

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

#83

Post by JumpCrisscross »

saalweachter wrote: post #77
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

From page 14:

"What are landowners to do if they want to build on their property? The EPA recommends asking the Corps for a jurisdictional determination, which is a written decision on whether a particular site contains covered waters. But the Corps maintains that it has no obligation to provide jurisdictional determinations, and it has already begun announcing exceptions to the legal effect of some previous determinations."

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

#84

Post by mabbo »

I think it's important to point out that wetlands and floodplains are a major part of what protects your home from flooding, and aren't just a simple nature reserve.

A wetland acts like a big sponge. A massive rainstorm drops a pile of water, and it absorbs into the wetland. It releases slowly. It's a buffer for water.

This means your infrastructure for moving the water through, past, around the city and urban areas can be smaller, since they don't need to handle so much water as once. Or that they can handle a larger rainstorm.

You want a wetland or ten upstream of your home. They are low cost to maintain, and provide a lot of value.

Source: my brilliant wife is one of Ontario's top municipal engineers on this topic and you can learn a lot just by asking "how was work" every night for 15 years.

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

#85

Post by liquidgecka »

cmh89 wrote: post #47
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…

> 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.

You use the term "This radicalized illegitimate SCOTUS" but you realize that the court was unanimous that the EPA had overstepped its authority under the law right?

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

#86

Post by knome »

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…

Our laws are supposed to be interpreted via precedent. We are not a fly by night French civil system. Our legal traditions are rooted in maintaining centuries of stability within the law, altering those interpretations only in accordance with new laws.

If the courts cannot be expected to consistently interpret the law, how can citizens be sure what that law means?

To turn over fifty years of precedent on a whim is certainly within the power of the supreme court, but only in the same manner that doing a poor job of running the federal government is within the powers of the executive.

There is nothing to stop them from doing their job poorly, because they are themselves the ones responsible for setting and maintaining high standards.

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

#87

Post by winter_blue »

nostromo wrote: post #57
winter_blue wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congress has been deadlocked for 12½ years (i.e. since January 2011) due to the Senate filibuster. Don't expect any meaningful¹ non-budgetary law to be passed until the filibuster² is gone. Since Congress is in a comatose state, executive branch agencies have come to rely on Chevron deference and related doctrines, and the people on the courts to expand executive branch authority. ¹ Congress manages to pass a few non…

This is false. Congress continues to pass a record number of bills, and often does so with broad bipartisan support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acts_of_the_117th_Unit... The current situation is not at all special or ahistorical. Every president since the founding has probably felt tempted to become a dictator and work around congress out of frustration -- thankfully we have the court system to (usually) s…

Many of the significant bills in the Wikipedia article are budgetary bills, which are not subject to the Senate filibuster.

I suspect the current Congress has not passed any meaningful non-budgetary legislation.

Some of the most important pending bills include restoring the Voting Rights Act (which was crippled by the conservative wing of the Supreme Court in the Shelby County v. Holder decision). That bill is still being blocked by the Republican party. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lewis_Voting_Rights_Act

The Voting Rights Act used to be a bill that was renewed with bipartisan support, but once the Republican party realized that the invalidation of this bill made it easier to suppress minority votes in red states, they've been opposed to its renewal.

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

#88

Post by ralusek »

Retric wrote: post #81
ralusek wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> arbitrarily change the rules after it’s already made up its mind. It is often the precedent which was arbitrary.

Sure, but that’s not an inherent issue. If things are arbitrary and you decide based on a coin flip then the coin flip needs to be binding or you just keep flipping coins. There’s many other systems we could use, but existing case law has the benefit of being extremely detailed. If navigable waterways in your state is public land, what happens after a dam is installed and they’re no longer navigable? That’s the kind…

An issue down to coin flips should be seen as a signal of a bug. However, I would argue that more often than not, it's not actually down to a coin flip. There is a default position in a liberal society, and that is that of minimal authority. Every legal question is fundamentally one of "does the state have the authority to do this, and if so, at what level?" If the answer is unclear, this should always resolve to no, or if yes, at the most localized level specified.

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

#89

Post by feoren »

xyzzyz wrote: post #17

The recent decision didn’t so much “strike down” the protections, but rather ruled that the relevant law does not apply to the wetlands the EPA used to apply it to. There was previous ruling, which according to SCOTUS, was erroneous, and so it reversed it. This is perfectly reasonable if you look at the original law and intent behind it, and the wetlands the federal agency no longer can claim control over. The origin…

> if given wetlands are not connected to interstate navigable waters

How many endorheic basins do we even have in the United States? And one of the major ones, the basin of the Great Salt Lake, is clearly navigable for commerce purposes (although obviously not for "interstate" commerce, which may be what matters here).

> 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

Why do we need to pass a law to assert something patently obvious to everyone? All waters are connected to major U.S. rivers except those in small endorheic basins. If some random person wants to build a house on a lake (which is a euphemism for: some major corporation wants to dump toxic waste in that lake), of course that affects all downstream waters of that lake, all the way to the ocean.

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

#90

Post by canjobear »

loeg wrote: post #42
xyzzyz wrote: post #17

The recent decision didn’t so much “strike down” the protections, but rather ruled that the relevant law does not apply to the wetlands the EPA used to apply it to. There was previous ruling, which according to SCOTUS, was erroneous, and so it reversed it. This is perfectly reasonable if you look at the original law and intent behind it, and the wetlands the federal agency no longer can claim control over. The origin…

I don't know why you say this doesn't "strike down" protections. Isn't this exactly what "striking down" means, in the context of the US judicial system?

Striking down usually means a law is invalidated because it is found unconstitutional. In this case, the issue was whether EPA's policy matched the language of a particular law or not, not whether that law itself was constitutional.
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