pictures of current supreme court justices

Reaction from environmental groups was scathing. With that foundation for its rule now invalidated by the court’s “continuous surface connection” ruling, the Biden EPA must go back to the drawing board. Kennedy’s test says the law applies to waters with a “significant nexus” to a navigable waterway.

Biden’s rule, like those issued by previous Republican and Democratic administrations, relied on a different legal test established by then-Justice Anthony Kennedy in Rapanos. The decision also throws into disarray the Biden administration’s effort to define “waters of the United States.” The EPA issued a rule in December that was seen as a compromise between a more expansive Obama definition and the narrow Trump policy, but federal courts have put it on hold in more than half the country.

The ramifications of the decision are profound: It strips protections from more water bodies than the Trump administration’s interpretation, which left about 51 percent of the nation’s wetlands open to development or degradation. That interpretation upholds a test established by the late Justice Antonin Scalia in a 2006 case, Rapanos v. In the 5-4 majority opinion, conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote that wetlands are covered by the law only if they have a “continuous surface connection” to larger water bodies that are clearly regulated by the Clean Water Act. Disagreement has prevailed for decades, with environmentalists arguing for broad protections to safeguard water quality and ecosystems, while builders, manufacturers, and others contend that including more streams and wetlands drives up project costs and infringes on property rights. Environmental Protection Agency, involved defining which water bodies that phrase applies to. That 1972 law made it illegal to drain, fill, or pollute “waters of the United States” without a permit. The majority of the nation’s wetlands where many birds raise their young, congregate in winter, and rest during migration-and which filter out pollutants and buffer communities from flooding and storm surges-lost legal protections on Thursday in a Supreme Court ruling that significantly curtails the reach of the Clean Water Act.

Pictures of current supreme court justices