Fed by streams tumbling from the Selkirk Mountains and bordered by parkland, the 19-mile stretch of clear water in the Idaho Panhandle known as Priest Lake has been called \u201cthe Lake Tahoe of the upper Northwest,\u201d The Washington Post reports. Houses and resorts crowd the privately owned lakeshore; piers and a marina jut into its waters.<\/p>\n
A local couple, Mike and Chantell Sackett run an excavation business in Priest Lake. Back in 2005, Chantell bought Mike a 0.63-acre lot in a subdivision about 500 feet from the lake, as a surprise.<\/p>\n
There are several homes between the Sackett lot and the shore, the Post reports; Mike worked on the construction of one and says it required no special federal permit.<\/p>\n
In 2007, the couple obtained local building permits and began to fill the lot in preparation for building their dream home. Three days later, officials from the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers ordered work to stop, claiming they thought the land might contain wetlands.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow can you call it a wetland when it\u2019s a lot in an existing subdivision that has a sewer hookup?\u201d asks Mike Sackett.<\/p>\n
The agency subsequently ordered the Sacketts to restore the site to its natural state before construction could begin. Failure to follow the orders could make the couple liable for fines of up to $37,500 a day — almost $15,000 more per day than they paid for the land!<\/p>\n
The EPA contends that was \u201ca starting point for negotiations,\u201d The Post reports. The couple respond by describing a bureaucratic maze that left them convinced they\u2019d never be able to build so long as the EPA\u2019s contention that the land contained \u201cwetlands\u201d was allowed to stand.<\/p>\n
(What would the government\u2019s position be after 60 days of such \u201cnegotiations,\u201d anyway? I believe at that point it would be, \u201cNow, Mr. and Mrs. Sackett, I think you\u2019ve wasted enough of our time, for which we\u2019re paid while you\u2019re not. So you can kneel down and kiss our butts and do exactly what we tell you, right now, or you can start by paying those $2.2 million in fines you\u2019ve racked up so far, Mr. and Mrs. Uppity Bankrupt Wise-ass.\u201d)<\/p>\n
The Pacific Legal Foundation features the Sacketts\u2019 four-year saga on its Web site under the headline \u201cTaking a Bully to the Supreme Court.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is what happens when an overzealous federal agency would rather force compliance than give any consideration to private property rights, individual rights, basic decency or common sense,\u201d says the Sacketts\u2019 U.S. senator, Mike Crapo, R-Idaho.<\/p>\n
So far, lower courts have agreed with the government that the agency\u2019s compliance orders are not subject to judicial review.<\/p>\n
The Sacketts and the Pacific Legal Foundation respond that even the prospect of waiting to see whether the EPA will go to court — it has years to make the decision — deprives the couple of their property rights, leaving them \u201cto the mercy and whim of EPA.\u201d<\/p>\n
This month, thank goodness, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the Sacketts\u2019 case.<\/p>\n
The issue before the court is narrow: whether the Sacketts can challenge the EPA\u2019s initial finding that their lot contains wetlands.<\/p>\n
The danger of a Sackett victory, squawk environmental extremists, is that it could allow \u201cmajor polluters\u201d to tie up the EPA in litigation.<\/p>\n
Oh, the humanity!<\/p>\n
Compliance orders and the threats of heavy fines are meant to persuade purported \u201cviolators\u201d to knuckle under and do whatever they\u2019re told without saddling bureaucrats with any of this onerous rigmarole designed to preserve any remaining vestiges of \u201cproperty rights\u201d and \u201cdue process,\u201d they argue.<\/p>\n
In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in a brief supporting the Sacketts, reports internal EPA documents uncovered in a different suit against the agency show the EPA trains employees to make compliance orders \u201cugly, onerous, and tough,\u201d precisely to coerce cave-ins — and the Fifth Amendment\u2019s \u201ctakings\u201d clause be damned.<\/p>\n
Yet the fans of Big Government continue to whine that overreaching regulations, arrogantly enforced, aren\u2019t damaging Americans\u2019 freedom and prosperity? How many carpenters and plumbers and sawmill operators sit idle while property owners like the Sacketts are blocked from developing their own land?<\/p>\n
For starters, the authority over navigable waters granted to the central government under the Constitution was intended to prevent any single state from blocking transit of a major river like the Ohio, in order to charge extortionate tolls that could limit interstate commerce.<\/p>\n
To stretch that power as justification for federal oversight of \u201cnational forests\u201d within the several states, on the grounds they serve as watersheds for \u201cnavigable\u201d rivers (including many a Western \u201criver\u201d that runs dry 10 months a year) was already, well … quite a stretch. That, of course, was then taken as justification for federal oversight of \u201cwetlands,\u201d once commonly held to mean \u201cswamps,\u201d most of which, presumably, eventually drain into \u201cnavigable waters.\u201d<\/p>\n
But to contend Priest Lake — lying entirely within the most remote corner of the state of Idaho\u00ca– is \u201cnavigable\u201d in the sense that commercial barges use it for interstate commerce is absurd, for starters. And beyond that, the EPA now embraces a definition of \u201cwetland\u201d which can refer to a piece of land where water pools and stands for as little as a couple of days per year after a heavy rain — hardly the swamp full of fish and turtles that most people envision from some old Disney two-reeler about \u201cLife in the Everglades.\u201d<\/p>\n
If the EPA controls any \u201cwaters\u201d that eventually flow into a navigable river, can it come into my house and supervise my use of the sink and the bathtub? Why not?<\/p>\n
The EPA is one of many federal agencies so far out of control — its mandate expanded to the point of absurdity, helping to bankrupt the treasury even as it cripples Americans\u2019 freedom and prosperity — that the Founding Fathers would have thought we were joking.<\/p>\n
If it can\u2019t be shut down entirely, this gang of arrogant goons needs at least to be slashed in size, its powers reined in under ongoing, regular legislative and judicial review.<\/p>\n
Though a true Supreme Court would note the absence of any Constitutional delegation of power for such an outfit as currently empaneled, and close the EPA down immediately, auctioning off its fancy trucks to the highest bidder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fed by streams tumbling from the Selkirk Mountains and bordered by parkland, the 19-mile stretch of clear water in the Idaho Panhandle known as Priest Lake has been called \u201cthe Lake Tahoe of the upper Northwest,\u201d The Washington Post reports. Houses and resorts crowd the privately owned lakeshore; piers and a marina jut into its […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[35,27,43,4,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-942","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-earth-stewardship","category-extreme-green","category-government-unions","category-private-property","category-science"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWqFl-fc","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=942"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":943,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/942\/revisions\/943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=942"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=942"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinsuprynowicz.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=942"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}