121–130 of 149 posts
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-10/
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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 ce…
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Congress specifically wrote the law to protect wetlands. The 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. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44585
Here, Congress said they were regulating the “navigable waters.” If they wanted to regulate wetlands, they should have said so in the text of the law. Congress didn’t say they wanted to regulate wetlands in the text of the law.
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> 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...
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…
This case has been 10 years in the making. In this case the EPA threatened to fine a family that wanted to develop a plot of land in a residential subdivision up to $75,000/day. The EPA claimed that because it had not yet fined the family, it's determination that their plot of land was a protected wetland under the Clean Water Act was not subject to judicial review. So the family would have a sword of Damocles hanging over their head if they decided to develop the land, but they couldn't challenge proactively that the land they wanted to develop was not in fact a protected wetland.
The Supreme Court unanimously held that the compliance order threatening the fine was subject to judicial review, leading to the second case involving this plot of land, as to whether it was in fact a protected wetland.
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Congress specifically wrote the law to protect wetlands. The 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. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44585
Well then they should have written the law better.
Sounds like you agree with this, but think about when the pendulum swings back and the freedoms you enjoy are now infringed upon by unelected, unaccountable justices that don’t GAF about the will of the the people.
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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…
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> 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.
Are we ignoring the fact that congress didn't need to fix this for the last 45 years, because the judiciary had set clear precedent on how it interpreted the law? Why would congress spend its time on bolstering the defenses of well-established laws against every potential random flip-flopping of the judiciary at any point in the future? That sounds like a tremendous waste of time, and an exercise in trying to mind-re…
Until someone checked and realized the wall was not where it claimed to be.
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> 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21407836
In fact, here's video of her plowing wetlands,
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/its-my-home-isl...
She won her politically correct case BTW
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/its-my-home-isl...
Hopefully Germany outlaws her existence and kicks her off wetland island. It would be poetic justice.
Watersheds aren't a local resource - they're a regional resource. This decision made no sense to begin with since, for instance, Vermont acting like a bad neighbor will cause environmental devastation in Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York - water sheds very rarely stay neatly within state boundaries. This becomes an even bigger issue when you look at the Mississippi - mining in North Dakota can cause issues in L…
> 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.
If the wetlands described don't fall under constitutional "Navigable Waterways" (via CWAs language "Waters of the US"), then congress does NOT have the constitutional authority to regulate it.