The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling on Tuesday that strikes down some rule that allowed the Environmental Protection Agency to limit the amount of pollution discharged into America’s waterways. The ruling was 5-4, with Amy Coney Barrett joining the court’s more liberal justices in dissenting.
The case was brought by the city of San Francisco after the EPA told it to stop discharging so much human sewage into the Pacific Ocean back in 2019. The city of San Francisco sued, joining forces with groups like the National Mining Association and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers to fight against the EPA, arguing the rules were too broad.
The case centered on the Clean Water Act of 1972 and whether the EPA’s rules on the amount of human waste allowed into large bodies of water were specific enough. The city of San Francisco was facing about $313 million in fines and about $10.6 billion in upgrades to its treatment facilities to comply with EPA standards, according to the Washington Post.
San Francisco has an outdated style of water treatment facility that combines sewage and stormwater, which causes the discharged water to be filled with human shit. The Clean Water Act doesn’t specifically lay out what needs to be done to make water clean, only making the city directly responsible for the water quality being good, according to Bloomberg Law. And the city argued that was too vague, with the Supreme Court agreeing.
Justice Alito, writing for the majority, explained that it wasn’t fair for the EPA to impose “crushing penalties if the quality of the water in its receiving waters falls below the applicable standards,” according to a copy of the ruling posted online. Conservative justices John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch joined in the opinion.
Amy Coney Barrett wrote the dissent, pointing out that while the majority opinion argues the EPA’s language is too vague, the court “does not explain what other course of action EPA could take.” Barrett also pointed out the water discharge had led to “discoloration, scum, and floating material, including toilet paper, in Mission Creek.” The more liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, sided with the typically conservative Barrett.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had previously sided with the EPA. But this new Supreme Court ruling is now the law of the land, as long as everyone just agrees to follow it. The tricky thing about Supreme Court rulings is that these nine justices have no way to actually enforce their rulings. And we’ve seen with President Donald Trump’s decisions to ignore court orders lately that laws only work if everybody just decides to follow along with a given court’s decisions.
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