According to the Supreme Court, science and clean water don’t matter

It’s hard to believe that in the year 2023, we’d have to say this: but clean water matters. Science matters. And that the health and integrity of our communities and ecosystems matter. Last week’s decision by the Supreme Court undermining the Clean Water Act comes as House Republicans have waged an ongoing crusade against this bedrock environmental law, voting twice this spring to gut clean water protections while they are also fighting to gut other foundational environmental laws in debt ceiling negotiations.

The Clean Water Act revolutionized access to clean water worldwide when it passed just over a half-century ago. 

For generations, raw sewage, chemicals, hazardous wastes, and other pollution drained into our nation’s rivers, streams, and wetlands. Untold numbers of Americans died from disease, cancer, and preventable illnesses that were transmitted through dirty water — and which were completely avoidable. Rivers caught fire from chemical spills, fish kills filled communities with the stench of death, and sewage poured into the rivers that people fished in and our children swam in.

For decades, our communities organized to ensure that every American could access clean water. In fact, when the Clean Water Act was signed into law in 1972, it passed Congress with a bipartisan supermajority. Republican senators even crossed party lines to override a veto by President Nixon when he rejected this bipartisan legislation. Because of their action and the tireless work of our communities, the United States became one of the first countries in the world to create a national framework for protecting and cleaning up our waters. It is fair to say that billions of people over the last 50 years have enjoyed clean water because of this bedrock law.

Last week’s decision fundamentally misrepresents and undermines the protections of the Clean Water Act and the science and hydrology of our nation’s waters. We cannot protect our drinking water or our rivers without also protecting our wetlands — because they are hydrologically connected systems.  

As the congresswoman for New Mexico’s 1st District and a water resources professional, I know that the Supreme Court’s decision will have far-reaching consequences for our state and the communities I represent. With this decision, about 93 percent of our streams and waterways in New Mexico will lose protection from polluters. Countless communities who live near small rivers and waterways across the United States will see them polluted without consequences. It’s wrong. And it runs counter to everything our communities have fought to achieve for generations.  

Never in American history have we seen a Supreme Court majority so at odds with the American people and our fundamental rights: the right to clean water, the right to make decisions about our own bodies, tribal sovereignty, and the right to vote. 

Sackett v. EPA joins decisions like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, West Virginia v. EPA, Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta, and Shelby County v. Holder which have upended generations of settled law. From abandoning 50 years of precedent by curtailing the rights of Americans to make decisions about their own bodies, to overturning more than 150 years of trust and treaty law honoring tribal sovereignty, to now gutting our fundamental right to clean water — one must ask what the goal of this court really is.

I cannot believe that in the year 2023, we would see our nation backsliding on clean water. This not only turns the clock back on our communities, but on our standing as a global environmental leader. For decades, the United States has proudly led the charge for clean water across the planet. 

This decision by the Supreme Court in Sackett v. EPA is yet another symptom of the extremists who have hijacked our institutions. This captured court is yet again putting profits, corporations, and the interests of polluters over the people of this great nation and our planet.

Melanie Stansbury represents New Mexico’s 1st District in Congress. She is the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations and recipient of the 2021 U.S. Water Prize.