Ignoring Donald Trump's announcement that he would have let the country go into default--not surprising since he has "experience" with bankruptcy--the House of Representatives passed a debt ceiling bill that neither the far-right or progressive left liked—mainly because on one hand it didn’t stick it to the poor enough, or on the other too much, and in this country how poverty is handled is usually the centerpiece of budgetary considerations.
Empathy—or lack thereof—for the less fortunate is the psychological quagmire from which politicians form their “principles,” or lack thereof. It’s doesn’t matter the peripheral issues—migrants, tax cuts for the rich, environmental regulation—the people already in a bad state get either the shaft or the share.
Of course when you have a Congress in a state of dysfunction as it is now, you can’t expect any meaningful business to get done to address the country’s long-term problems, only short-term band aids like the debt ceiling increase. When something meaningful does somehow get passed, like the ACA, half the electorate loses its mind.
So who is stepping in to make the “hard” decisions that Congress won’t do to insure a future that generations can survive in? How about those paragons of wisdom in the U.S. Supreme Court, especially those who seem to believe that short-term greed is a fair price to pay for long-term destruction?
When most people think of wetlands, what do they think? Habitat for birds, and frogs. A holding area for runoff water from creeks and streams. You can see this around the peripheries of Kent, particularly in the northern section “housed” mostly with light industrial warehouses which are required to close off areas for wetland use.
These wetland areas are very important for most of the year; during the rainy season, they hold runoff water from creeks that have crested, which has two key uses: flood control, and maintaining the habitat for local species. For example, frogs need a source of standing water in order to breed, and the more water, the longer it remains above ground and the more time tadpoles have to grow to adulthood.
Canada Geese and Mallards also need the local wetlands to breed; too often I have seen during times of below normal precipitation, geese with young are forced to cross roads in search of water, and not all humans are “patient” enough to wait for them; from what I can tell, some even get a “kick” out of running them over. The geese young here are trapped in one of these fenced-off areas with a dwindling water supply until they are able to fly; they may be the "lucky" ones:
Pollution, particularly from farm and industrial runoff, is a concern to the health of wetlands; unfortunately, “human rights" for the political right is overrides any such concerns. An Idaho couple—Michael and Chantell Sackett, were miffed when the learned that a portion of their property was identified as a wetland which they wanted to build on. They refused to simply apply for a permit, instead taking the issue to court, claiming that the wetland was not in fact a wetland at all, let alone one that should be “protected” under current law as stated in Section 404 of the Clean Water Act. The Ninth Circuit Court ruled that the law correctly identified the area being challenged as a regulated wetland, and the ruling was appealed to the Supreme Court.
What did the 5-4 majority rule? In layman’s terms, that wetlands are not protected by the Clean Water Act unless they have a “continuous surface connection to larger, regulated bodies of water.” This is a dangerous and ignorant interpretation of the Section 404; Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion went even further, which apparently was written for him by the Federalist Society, since it’s the only place where the term “Federalist” is mentioned; Thomas’s “concurrence” asserts that the Constitution only allows regulation of “navigable” waters, not small lakes, ponds, tributaries in a larger river system, streams and runoff creeks—let alone wetlands.
This apparently went too far for even Brett Kavanaugh—and not John Roberts, who voted with the majority to prove his right-wing “cred.” Kavanaugh agreed with the majority opinion on the narrow point that the specific piece of land was not sufficiently “wet” to be protected by the Clean Water Act, but he was aghast, along with the court’s three liberals, that the court almost completely gutted wetland protections in favor of property rights without regard to the consequences:
I write separately because I respectfully disagree with the Court’s new test for assessing when wetlands are covered by the Clean Water Act. The Court concludes that wetlands are covered by the Act only when the wetlands have a “continuous surface connection” to waters of the United States—that is, when the wetlands are “adjoining” covered waters. Ante, at 20, 22 (internal quotation marks omitted). In my view, the Court’s “continuous surface connection” test departs from the statutory text, from 45 years of consistent agency practice, and from this Court’s precedents. The Court’s test narrows the Clean Water Act’s coverage of “adjacent” wetlands to mean only “adjoining” wetlands. But “adjacent” and “adjoining” have distinct meanings: Adjoining wetlands are contiguous to or bordering a covered water, whereas adjacent wetlands include both (i) those wetlands contiguous to or bordering a covered water, and (ii) wetlands separated from a covered water only by a man-made dike or barrier, natural river berm, beach dune, or the like. By narrowing the Act’s coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands, the Court’s new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States. Therefore, I respectfully concur only in the Court’s judgment.
The other dissenting justices condemned the right-wing of the court now declaring itself the new “experts” on environmental regulation completely at odds with both science and the future of human kind—unless of course these justices are the Apocalyptic religious types, like Reagan’s first Interior Secretary, James Watt, who when asked about what were his “plans” to preserve the environment and natural resources, professed to not see the point, because “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.” If you need any proof of the alliance of the religious nuts and the far-right, there you have it.
This ruling leaves open all kinds of mischief. The Florida Everglades is technically a wetland, and is not “navigable” for commercial shipping. With this ruling, we can imagine some crazed far-right nutcase like Ron DeSantis declaring the Everglades open season for “development.” Even if it probably wouldn’t happen given the likely uproar even in Florida, the Supreme Court’s decision nevertheless allows it—and that is the danger. Relying on people’s “common sense” and their level of concern about the future—and let’s face it, there is no “paradise” waiting for people who willfully destroy the creation of “God”—is like expecting a career criminal to go “straight.”
Of course this was all set-up by the disastrously stupid decision by all six of the Court’s “conservatives” when they ruled last year that any government agency—let alone the EPA—has no authority to regulate major issues of concern that are not specifically stated in a law passed by Congress, meaning that if an asteroid the size of India was hurtling toward a direct hit on, say, California, and is likely to cause catastrophic climate change, any actions taken against such an event is “invalid” because is not mentioned in any law passed by Congress.
That sounds ridiculous to you? Stupid? Well that is the Supreme Court essentially saying about anything “major” that is not mentioned in any regulation or specific function of a government agency passed by Congress. All it takes is for someone to file a lawsuit that whatever action is being taken against an oncoming catastrophe violates their “right” to be stupid. And who knows, a far-right religious nut of a judge might agree with that.
NPR reported that the Court absurdly ruled that “an agency ‘can't simply retrofit an old statute to create new tools or new mechanisms’ to address a problem that is generally within the agency's jurisdiction.” Not surprisingly the “problem” under consideration was climate change, global warming and the human factor. A West Virginia coal company argued that its business was being “unfairly” targeted by new regulations by the Obama administration that rewarded states which reduced the use of coal in favor of “cleaner” energy. Although later blocked by right-wing courts, it turned out that many states followed common sense and reduced their use of coal to targeted goals a decade early.
But the Supreme Court ruled that these targeted goals should never have been sought in the first place, since it had an adverse “economic impact” on even just one corner of business (coal production and use). NPR noted that the Court was bringing back from the dead the so-called "the major questions doctrine," in which “the court said that neither the EPA nor any other agency may adopt rules that are transformational to the economy—unless Congress has specifically authorized such a rule to address a specific problem, like climate change.”
An expert on environmental law, Harvard professor Richard Lazarus, derided the ruling: "That's a very big deal because they're not going to get it from Congress because Congress is essentially dysfunctional. This could not have come at a worse time…the consequences of climate change are increasingly dire and we're running out of time to address it." Justice Elena Kagan was no less appalled in her dissenting opinion, accusing the far-right of the Court of “making up new rules that contradict nearly a century of regulatory law,” since the Clean Air Act, “clearly anticipates that the EPA will have to deal with new problems and uses broad language to allow that.”
Furthermore, the Court majority "does not have a clue about how to address climate change...yet it appoints itself, instead of congress or the expert agency...the decision-maker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening."
Kavanaugh voted with the 6-3 majority in that case; whether or not his dissenting opinion on the wetlands case brought him back down to Earth in the realization of the disastrous consequences of the earlier decision is a moot point; the damage is done and there is no way that it can be undone unless there is sufficient Democratic control in Congress (meaning a majority that doesn't need Manchin or Sinema) as well as holding on to the White House.
On the other hand, does the majority of the country honestly care? In their minds, climate change is too “incremental” to notice. It’s like those cracks in the sidewalks. The look the “same” as they did yesterday, but if you had a picture of it two or even one decade ago, the change is obvious. And what will it look like ten years from now? It would certainly need “fixing,” but at a cost few want to pay and many who have the audacity to wonder how it got so bad without anyone taking the time or effort to “fix” it.
The only problem with that example is that the causes of climate change just seem too “big” to fix, and that is the fault of all of those who didn’t want to “pay” for it. And now you’ve got the Supreme Court you asked for and made the hard decisions “easier” to evade.
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