Samuel Alito's Wetlands-Destroying Opinion Pretends Physics Doesn't Exist

You may have heard about the Supreme Court's recent ruling in Sackett v. EPA that the Clean Water Act does not permit the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate the use of wetlands that are not connected at the surface to lakes, rivers and streams. While there's been plenty of analysis of the significant legal flaws in the ruling--which will greatly restrict the ability of the EPA to protect not only wetlands but our entire fresh water system--less has been said about the science undergirding the case. The reality is this: The ruling takes no consideration whatsoever of the science of water. The court ruled that protection under the CWA only applies when wetlands have "a continuous surface connection to bodies that are'waters of the United States' in their own right, so that there is no clear demarcation between'waters' and wetlands." Justice Samuel Alito arrived at this distinction by parsing the wording of the Clean Water Act as passed by Congress in 1972 and amended in 2018--specifically the words "waters of the United States"--and the opinion makes much of this means of arriving at the decision.