The eight remaining U.S. Supreme Court justices will consider Friday whether to hear the American Farm Bureau Federation’s (AFBF) challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency-led (EPA) cleanup plan for the Chesapeake Bay.
AFBF contends the agency conveniently ignored a key provision of the Clean Water Act that instructed it to cooperate with state and local agencies and, instead, turned to unilateral bureaucratic action. In a December 2010 document, EPA gave itself authority over all Bay tributaries, drainage ditches and even land from which nutrients or sediment might eventually wash into tributaries, according to AFBF.
AFBF believes this federal power grab has given the agency the ability to trump local and state authority and veto where a farmer can use his own land, where a city can build a new building or even where a homeowner can add onto his house.
And it’s not confined just to the Chesapeake Bay watershed, according to AFBF. In his executive order, President Obama told EPA to make full use of its powers in a way that could be “replicated” throughout the nation.
AFBF has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in, joined by groups representing home builders, corn growers and chicken, turkey, egg, pork and fertilizer producers. Ninety-two members of Congress, 22 states, forestry groups and contributors to the U.S. economy—like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent Business—filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support.
POLITICO reports opponents were surely counting on the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s support in arguing the EPA plan infringes on states’ rights to determine land use.