'There's a range of outcomes, all of which are bad.' 😬
That brings us to the case the court agreed to hear this week,. In 2007, Chantal and Mike Sackett started construction on their property near Priest Lake, Idaho. The couple subsequently received a
from the EPA alerting them that the wetland they were filling in was protected under the Clean Water Act. The agency ordered them to stop work and restore the wetland or face heavy daily fines.The Sacketts, instead, decided to sue, and their case made it to the Supreme Court. This case wasn’t about the wetland itself, but rather whether or not the couple could challenge the EPA in the first place. The court sided with the Sacketts in 2012.
That should have settled it. But the Sacketts decided to keep going, challenging the original EPA order about the wetland on their property—even as the agency said it had no plans to enforce it. “They are in the fight at this point purely for ideological reasons,” Owen said.Let’s pause to note that a lot of this fuss would have been avoided in the first place, Owen said, if the Sacketts had simply gotten a permit.