Hi, this is Dahlia Lithwick. It's not even junior yet, and opinion Paloza at the

High Court has already kicked off with a bang. On Thursday, three decisions came

down, including Sackett VEPA. The case concerning wetlands and the waters of

the United States with huge implications for pollution and biodiversity.

Mark Joseph Stern and I got together to pick over what's left of federal

water policy on an extra episode for our Slate Plus members. In what was

effectively a five-to-four decision, the majority, which was Alito, Roberts,

Thomas, Gorsuch, and Barrett, decided to just rewrite the Clean Water Act. And they

said, look, if this really protects all those wetlands, that's a lot of wetlands.

And we think that's too much protection for wetlands. And we know a lot of

developers want to obliterate those wetlands. And we like those developers, and we

want them to obliterate the wetlands. So we're going to take a pen and cross out

the words wetlands adjacent to and replace them with this new test. So the new

test says that wetlands have to have a continuous surface connection. That is

pretty rare. I think a majority of wetlands in this country do not have an

ongoing connection to a larger body of water because that's not how they work,

right? They dry up in some seasons, they flood in other seasons. They're often

separated from the larger body of water by something like a berm or a dune. And

because of that, there are just a huge number of wetlands that will not be

protected under this decision. It's so egregious that even Brett Kavanaugh had to

write an opinion saying, I think we should stick to the text. The text says that

any wetlands that are adjacent to a larger body of water are protected.

...