Op-Ed in the New York Times from yesterday by former EPA administrator William K. Reilly. EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers (which actually does a great deal of the day-to-day work of regulating development in wetlands and, thus, enforcing the CWA) are rewriting their rules in the wake of Solid Waste Agency v. Cook County and Rapanos v. United States. Those two decisions essentially narrowed the scope of the CWA by limiting what waters the act covers. Solid Waste held that an abandoned sand and gravel pit that had become a stop-over for migrating waterfoul was not covered by the act, and Rapanos decided that "waters of the United States" was limited to "relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water 'forming geographic features' that are described in ordinary parlance as 'streams,' 'oceans, rivers, [and] lakes.'"
Reilly urges the agencies to hold the line and try to combat the above Supreme Court decisions. Since these two cases looked to both statutory language and Constitutional limitations in making their decisions, I'm not sure how much leeway EPA and the Corps have to change things via rulemaking, but time, and litigation, will tell.
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