Supreme Court Rules That Mud Puddles in Your Driveway Are Not Federal Property

You know that the Supreme Court must have done something right when you wake up to find Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Biden’s press flack Karine Jean-Pierre bashing the justices.

The high court has just issued an important ruling that restores American property rights in a significant manner. By overturning an Obama-era regulation that Joe Biden had reinstated (Trump overturned the rule for his four years in office), the federal government can no longer seize your property if it rains on it. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it’s not.

The environmental rule that the Supreme Court just voted on is the Waters of the US, or WOTUS. The original intent of WOTUS was not to “protect the environment” through the EPA, but rather to have a regulatory system in place that can manage disputes between states.

The Mississippi River is the simplest example of this. Suppose that every city bordering the Mississippi in Minnesota decided to dump raw sewage in the river. That would obviously impact ten other states and millions of people.

WOTUS was a system to keep important navigable waters safe for the public to use them. Since the Mississippi is used for irrigation, shipping and trade across 11 states, it’s clearly a Water of the US, and the federal government is needed to manage disputes between states over the allowable uses.

But what if it rains and there’s a mud puddle in your driveway afterward? Is that a “Water of the US?” Should the federal government be allowed to boss you around or seize your property because you occasionally have some water on it?

That sounds absurd, but that is exactly how Barack Obama abused the Waters of the US through the EPA. After Obama amended WOTUS, the EPA sued a couple named Michael and Chantell Sackett in Idaho. They had started building their dream house on a piece of property they owned.

The property had a ditch on it. Whenever it rained, the runoff would flow through that ditch and into a creek, which fed into an intrastate lake named Priest Lake. The Obama EPA declared the Sacketts’ ditch to be a Water of the United States and told the couple to tear down the construction work that had been done so far, and to clean up the site. The EPA then fined them $40,000 per day until the site was cleaned up.

The ditch didn’t even have water in it on a regular basis. It collects runoff during heavy rainstorms. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the Sacketts’ ditch is obviously not a Water of the US that the federal government can regulate. They also dropped the hammer on the EPA and the Biden White House, by clarifying what should be considered a Water of the US.

The court says that the federal government has to define a WOTUS as a water source with a “continuous surface connection” to a major body of water. That makes way more sense than having the feds show up one day and ruining your life just because it rained on your driveway.

Trump had overturned the Obama WOTUS rule, but then Joe Biden reinstated it, because leftists love bossing everyone around and poking their noses into every area of our lives. The Sacketts’ lawsuit against the EPA had been going on since Barack Obama was in the White House. It’s good that they finally got relief from this outrageous federal regulation, and that no one else will have to go through this nightmare again.

The Democrats have the sads about it. Chuck Schumer said about the ruling, “This MAGA Supreme Court is continuing to erode our country’s environmental laws. Make no mistake – this ruling will mean more polluted water, and more destruction of wetlands.”

Yeah. Sure. It was a 9-0 decision. WOTUS was being abused so outrageously that the government couldn’t convince those MAGA justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan that it was a good idea.

Karine Jean-Pierre said, “It will jeopardize the sources of clean drinking water for farmers, businesses and millions of Americans.”

They haven’t been this mad since the court overturned Roe v. Wade, so you know the court must have done something right. And of course, this really wouldn’t have been possible without President Trump appointing three solid justices to the court, to back up Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas.