After a decade of being thrown out by the courts and being slightly modified and enacted again, changes drastically expanding the definition of Waters of the United States (WOTUS) to include man-made ponds on family farms may finally be ending.

During the Biden administration it was enacted again, and challenged in court again, but while it waited the Biden EPA was sending armed federal marshals to "inspect" farms without legal authority. Using Chevron Deference, which inflicted a 40-year reign of terror on evidence-based science, agencies could do anything, including create regulations that act as laws without needing Congress, as long as it was within their mandate. So more social authoritarian presidents simply expanded the mandate of agencies. That allowed them to create bizarre rulings like declaring a river in Virginia a pollutant and demand a county pay $500,000,000 to slow the rapids for kayakers under the pretense of it being too fast for wildlife. Or tell a Louisiana landowner they had to tear down a forest and put in a new one for a frog that didn't exist in Louisiana, and is literally named the Mississippi Gopher Frog.


How many Coast Guard vessels can be on this Biden-era navigable water of the United States? Credit: Agweb

The Supreme Court hadn't used Chevron Deference but lower courts did, and then SCOTUS had to overturn it time and again, which is why the Frog was not allowed to take over Louisiana. Finally, a small fishing boat told by the Biden administration that had to let a federal employee on their boat to monitor them - and pay for the employee - was too much for the Supreme Court and they officially found what they long knew; that Chevron Deference was terrible law enacted by the worst Supreme Court since SCOTUS of the 1920s made it legal to sterilize women to promote the eugenics beliefs of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. "Because Chevron's justifying presumption is, as Members of the Court have often recognized, a fiction," they wrote.

That, coupled with Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, in which the EPA tried to force a couple in Idaho to place wetlands on their property claiming they were Waters of the United States, got SCOTUS to limit it once and for all. Unanimously. Claiming any puddle of water could seep into the ground and go to a stream which could go to a river and then to the ocean where aircraft carriers exist, which meant every farm was under the control of the US Navy - no, really - and therefore by every federal agency, was too much.

Now, EPA has signaled they are going to stop trying to control farms and get back to protecting the actual environment.

If there is one thing Democrats have declared recently, it is that social authoritarianism is suddenly bad, because they are not the only ones who can do it. Perhaps in the near future so many in academia and on the coasts will stop blindly endorsing claims by environmental lawyers and the lobbyists they fund. It is not pro-science, it is just creating precedent for the other side to overrule and ignore science also.