A Supreme Court decision on wetlands might have affected debt ceiling talks on the Mountain Valley Pipeline
Environmentalists are frustrated that President Joe Biden agreed to greenlight the controversial Mountain Valley Pipeline, or MVP, as part of the bipartisan deal that resolved the debt ceiling standoff. But by the time the deal was announced, a new decision authored by Justice Samuel Alito had already made it far harder for environmentalists to raise concerns about projects like the MVP.
In light of that legal development, it might have been an understandable concession for Biden to offer. After all, it was one that had been partially lost in litigation just a week earlier.
On May 25, the Supreme Court dropped a bombshell with its majority opinion in Sackett v. EPA, a Clean Water Act case considering whether wetlands 300 feet from Priest Lake, Idaho, should be considered “adjacent” to the lake and thus protected as part of the “waters of the United States.”