A North Carolina business owner and the Pacific Legal Foundation have filed a lawsuit against Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency for ignoring a water law precedent established by the U.S. Supreme Court several years ago.
That precedent, in a case involving the Sackett family of Idaho, established that “waters,” in order to be considered “waters of the U.S.,” must be connected by surface water to an actual federal water resource, such as a lake or river.
That case essentially involved some soggy pieces of a residential subdivision lot on which the Sacketts wanted to build a home. The Supreme Court ruled in their favor twice, establishing that the EPA could not attack, threaten and punish them over water the bureaucracy had no claim over.
In the newest dispute, Robert White of North Carolina filed an action against the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers “for ignoring” the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“Ours is a nation of laws, not of unrestrained bureaucrats,” said Charles Yates, a Pacific Legal Foundation lawyer. “EPA’s new navigable waters rule completely fails to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Sackett v. EPA. Regulators cannot ignore the Supreme Court when it rules against them.”
The legal team explained the Sackett II ruling established that the Clean Water Act “extends to only those wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are ‘waters of the United States’ in their own right, so that they are indistinguishable from those waters.”
The PLF said White has worked for years to build a commercial seafood business, and he’s invested much in coastal property as a way “to ensure financial security for his children.”
The problem is he’s facing financial ruin because of the “remorseless power grab by two federal agencies, even after they were unanimously rebuked by the Supreme Court.”
“Some of Robert’s land is in a low-lying region along Big Flatty Creek and the Pasquotank River and is prone to flooding. Robert set out to make the necessary improvements to minimize flooding risks and to facilitate productive uses, including agriculture and mineral extraction,” the legal team said.
White obtained all the needed state permits and permissions, but then was put in a bull’s-eye by the EPA and Corps of Engineers, which claimed his land has “navigable waters.”
While the case against White was begun before the final Sackett ruling, that in and of itself should have prompted a “change” in the bureaucrats’ action, but it didn’t, the PLF said.
And, the legal team said, the EPA’s new “rule” that allegedly meets the requirements of the Supreme Court’s standard, doesn’t.
Instead, the agencies claim “broad federal authority over enormous areas of private land, in every corner of the country,” the PLF said.
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