President Donald Trump groused in 2017 that Obama’s EPA wetlands rule could apply to “nearly every puddle or every ditch on a farmer’s land or everywhere else that they decide,” which he labeled “a massive power grab.”
In 2020, the Trump administration issued new wetlands regulations that the Biden administration nullified in 2021.
Despite the 2012 Supreme Court rebuff, the feds kept hounding the Sacketts, and their case returned to the highest court late last year.
EPA demanded the Sacketts get a federal Clean Water Act permit to build their house, their lawyers complained, because “Priest Lake is a navigable water; a non-navigable creek connects to Priest Lake; the non-navigable creek is connected to a non-navigable, man-made ditch; the non-navigable, man-made ditch is connected to wetlands; these wetlands, though separated from the Sacketts’ lot by a 30-foot-wide paved road, are nevertheless ‘similarly situated’ to wetlands alleged to exist on the Sacketts’ lot.”
EPA persisted even though the agency “recognizes” that “no water at all — surface or subsurface — flows from the Sacketts’ lot to the wetlands or to the ditch across the street,” Pacific Legal Foundation lawyers complained.
All nine Supreme Court justices agreed Thursday that federal bureaucrats had no right to seize control over the Sacketts’ property…
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Article URL : https://nypost.com/2023/05/25/supreme-court-strikes-blow-against-bureaucratic-tyranny-in-epa-case/