Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Bonus: SCOTUS Nukes Wetlands Protections
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4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 26 May 2023
⏱️ 4 minutes
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Summary
In this bonus episode for Amicus Plus listeners, Dahlia Lithwick and Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern discuss the latest biggest Supreme Court decision: Sackett v EPA. It’s good news for developers and polluters, bad news for the rest of us.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, this is Dahlia Lithwick. It's not even June yet. And Opinion Palooza at the High Court has already kicked off with a bang. On Thursday, three decisions came down, including Sackett v. EPA, the case concerning wetlands and the waters of the United States with huge implications for pollution and biodiversity. |
| 0:22.6 | Mark Joseph Stern and I got together to pick over what's left of federal water policy on an |
| 0:27.9 | extra episode for our Slate Plus members. |
| 0:30.7 | In what was effectively a five to four decision, the majority, which was Alito, Roberts, |
| 0:41.5 | 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 |
| 0:46.0 | wetlands. And we think that's too much protection for wetlands. And we know a lot of developers want |
| 0:51.7 | to obliterate those wetlands. And we like those developers. And we want them to obliterate those wetlands. And we like those developers and we want them to obliterate the wetlands. |
| 0:57.3 | So we're going to take a pen and cross out the words wetlands adjacent to and replace them with this new test. |
| 1:06.5 | So the new test says that wetlands have to have a continuous surface connection. |
| 1:10.7 | That is pretty rare. I think a majority that wetlands have to have a continuous surface connection. That is pretty rare. |
| 1:12.9 | I think a majority of wetlands in this country do not have an ongoing connection to a larger |
| 1:18.4 | body of water because that's not how they work, right? |
| 1:21.3 | They dry up in some seasons. |
| 1:23.3 | They flood in other seasons. |
| 1:25.1 | They're often separated from the larger body of water by something like a berm or a dune. |
| 1:32.1 | And because of that, there are just a huge number of wetlands that will not be protected under this decision. |
| 1:39.1 | It's so egregious that even Brett Kavanaugh had to write an opinion saying, I think we should stick to the text. |
| 1:45.8 | The text says that any wetlands that are adjacent to a larger body of water are protected, |
| 1:50.5 | whatever the majority is doing here, this stuff is not what Congress wrote. |
| 1:54.8 | We should apply the law that Congress actually passed. |
| 1:57.9 | And we should not just be going in our own direction because we think that developers |
| 2:02.1 | should have a lot more latitude to obliterate and fill in and build upon these incredibly |
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