In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson told a room full of governors and state officials that he found the filthy river flowing a mile from the Capitol “disgraceful.” Now the Potomac River runs much cleaner, thanks to the landmark Clean Water Act of 1972 — and that adjective employed by Johnson serves as an apt description today of the failures of the Supreme Court and Congress to protect the nation’s waterways. After half a century of painstaking restoration under the Clean Water Act, streams and wetlands nationwide are once again at risk of contamination by pollution and outright destruction as a result of a ruling on Thursday by the Supreme Court. The Environmental Protection Agency has long interpreted the Clean Water Act as protecting most of the nation’s wetlands from pollution. But now the court has significantly limited the reach of the law, concluding that it precludes the agency from regulating discharges of pollution into wetlands unless they have “a continuous surface connection” to bodies of water that, using “ordinary parlance,” the court described as streams, oceans, rivers and lakes. At least half of the nation’s wetlands could lose protection under this ruling, which provides an even narrower definition of “protected waters” than the Trump administration had sought.

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