Narrowing The CWA

The Supreme Court handed down a divided opinion about the applicability of the Clean Water Act today. I’ll let my two legal-eagle guest bloggers (and environmental policy specialist co-blogger) parse out the details; in summary, existing Army Corps of Engineers interpretation of the scope of the CWA are no longer applicable, the court’s four most reactionary members wanted a very narrow ruling (apparently we can add “deference to the reasonable interpretations of executive branch officials” as another asserted principle that Scalia is happy to abandon), the JPS/RBG/DS /SB dissents wanted to uphold the existing standards, and Kennedy played the O’Connor role of muddying the jurisdictional waters to the point where they’re opaque (as Roberts pointed out.) Although the Commerce Clause evidently lurks in the background, it’s essentially a statutory interpretation case, so it’s not entirely clear how far Roberts and Alito will go in adopting the New Federalism standard yet, although the narrow construction of the statute provides a good guess…