Sure, if you pollute a ditch and then the pollution runs off into a river then you you have run afoul of the Clean Water Act. But if all you’re doing is filling

Sure, if you pollute a ditch and then the pollution runs off into a river then you you have run afoul of the Clean Water Act. But if all you’re doing is filling in a ditch with soil then you haven’t. That’s all the homeowner in this case ever did. They’re not a huge corporation dumping toxic chemicals into a river, they just filled in a ditch with soil. The ditch itself was dug by a previous owner of the property. Does the ditch count as a wetland? The court has decided that it does not. > perversion of the basic concept of the rule of law. You have this completely backwards. In the 70s when the CWA was created, the EPA did not consider every single ditch in America to be covered by the CWA. Congress didn’t modify the law to include every single ditch in America. They did, however, modify it in 1977 to include all “adjacent wetlands”. This was clearly intended to allow the CWA to apply to any wetland adjacent to a river or lake carrying interstate or international trade. But nobody back then thought that it covered the ditch in your back yard. It wasn’t until 2006 that the EPA started gradually expanding the scope of their activities, culminating in the present case where they are trying to assert their authority over every single place where water flows, or could flow. The rule of law requires that people know what the law is, and it thus follows that it requires that the agencies which enforce the law may not gradually expand their definitions in order to grab more and more power. If you want the EPA to have more power, then tell your congresscritter to give it to them. Anything else is a perversion of the rule of law.