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A decade ago the supreme court unanimously ruled that people are actually allowed to appeal federal agency rulings to the court system, which the Obama administration did not want. The EPA had attempted to fine a couple $75,000 a day for starting to build a home in compliance with local permitting, on the theory that their land being next to a ditch gave the federal government control over the land. The houses right next to the local lake didn't bother the government: they just randomly picked this couple to ruin. Moreover, the EPA claimed that nobody could challenge its rulings in court, as they were "civil actions" rather than final penalties.
The court remanded the case and allowed the couple to appeal the EPA ruling, and it has been working its way back up the appeals courts ever since.
The couple just won a second unanimous supreme court case against Biden's EPA, which had attempted to define the navigable waters of the united states to mean any land on which there is any standing water at any time of the year (turning about 80% of US land into "water" for legal purposes). The EPA tried to moot the case by withdrawing their compliance order, but
It's interesting and a little encouraging that even the liberal members of the court (except Ginsburg) are not eager to give the executive infinite unappealable power. You might get a letter out of the blue threatening you with ruinous fines or prosecution because some federal agency decided to go after you as a test case, but if you have a hundred million dollars and backing from the US Chamber of Commerce, you might actually win after several decades of legal action.
That is not the worst summary of a legal issue I have ever heard, but it isn't great. The Administrative Procedures Act provides for judicial review of “final agency action for which there is no other adequate remedy in a court.” 5 U. S. C. §704. The issue in the case was whether "final agency action" had yet occurred. Not whether "people are actually allowed to appeal federal agency rulings to the court system," since people have been doing that successfully for decades.
No, 40 CFR 120.2 defines "waters of the United States" to include wetlands, and "wetlands" to mean "those areas that are inundated or saturated by surface or ground water at a frequency and duration sufficient to support, and that under normal circumstances do support, a prevalence of vegetation typically adapted for life in saturated soil conditions." And according to the Court's decision, that definition dates to the early 1980s. And see, eg, People of State of Ill. v. Outboard Marine Corp, 619 F.2d 623, 627 fn 14 (2nd Cir. 1980) (quoting the rule). It was not a creation of "Biden's EPA," as you imply.
It's a bit worse than that; Sackett (2012) asked whether an agency's final ruling with penalties counted if the agency might change its mind about enforcement, but it also had to decide that "The Clean Water Act is not a statute that “preclude[s] judicial review” under the APA, 5 U. S. C. §701(a)(1)." And SCOTUS had to make that conclusion because the government argued such preclusion seriously. Indeed, the lower court decision references cases that accepted that explicitly.
The poster is probably referring to various rulemakings and interpretations around that rule, which has been repeatedly modified: the 2023 final rule actually starts with a relatively complete (if not exactly unbiased) summary of the recent history, but also see the 2014 NPR, 2020 final rule, timeline 2001-2016 here.
The definition of "wetlands" in the CFR was not changed, but not all wetlands were covered by the Clean Water Act's past interpretations. I can't find the 1980 version from a quick search, but the 1986 guideline is here (cw: large pdf): it explicitly only covered "interstate wetlands" and "wetlands adjacent to waters (other than waters that themselves are wetlands)", where adjacency required "means bordering, contiguous, or neighboring", with some exceptions for manmade structures and beach dunes. By contrast, Obama- and Biden-area rules do not require adjacency, but merely a "significant nexus", pulling the term directly from Kennedy's concurrence in Rapanos (ie, and thus a term that was not used before 2006).
Estimates on exactly how many acres this covered are hard to come by, not least of all because every expansive WoTUS rule also advocated a case-by-case analysis, and probably didn't include literally every place to ever have standing water, but the claim that it didn't expand the area or coverage significantly doesn't pass the sniff test.
How far is "neighboring", they're 300 feet away from the lake.
This case is weird because the objectionable part doesn't seem to be the idea that the ditch on their land has some relation to the water quality of the lake, but the treatment of gravel and sand as pollutants. If they had been dumping highly toxic waste on marshy land next to a ditch that flowed into Priest Lake we wouldn't care whether it's technically adjacent or not, we'd understand that some amount of the water-soluble pollutants are going to make it into the lake. The maddening part is treating construction sand like toxic waste.
Having had to secure an erosion and sedimentation permit, there's good reason for treating sand and gravel as waste. It may not kill fish the way a more traditional toxin will, but it can seriously gum up an ecosystem enough to have the same effect on the health of a stream or lake. There is a whole host of Federal regulations concerning how much fill you can dump into a lake.
Right, but nobody was planning to dump fill in the lake as a part of this homebuilding process I shouldn't think?
If the Sacketts were to dump a bunch of diesel on their property, it's plausible that this could pollute the lake -- but sand and gravel to not travel in the water table this way, and should be regulated separately if the EPA is going to take an expansive enough definition of "waterway" to cover groundwater pollution.
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