Dave's Blog

an "activist judge" rewrites the Clean Water Act

Antonin Scalia must be an engineer, too.

Sorry to be so snarky, but this is complete and total crap. It’s hard for the public to see it because of the esoteric language, but this is simply a judicially-imposed political preference dressed up in legalese. Using a Webster’s Dictionary as statutory text, Scalia amends “waters” to mean “permanent, standing or flowing bodies of water.” That is what my good friend Robert Bork calls illegitimate.

On a more general level, it’s border-line high comedy listening to Supreme Court Justices and their fresh-out-of-law-school clerks draw upon their extensive scientific expertise to dictate the nation’s water policy by effectively amending both legislative text and the expert agency’s administrative regulations

http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/