North Carolina property owner takes on regulators for ignoring Supreme Court decision in Sackett

Raleigh, NC; March 15, 2024: Yesterday, Robert White filed suit against the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers for ignoring the Supreme Court’s ruling in Sackett v. EPA.

“Ours is a nation of laws, not of unrestrained bureaucrats,” said Charles Yates, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation. “EPA’s new navigable waters rule completely fails to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Sackett v. EPA. Regulators cannot ignore the Supreme Court when it rules against them.”

In Sackett II, the Court ruled “the [Clean Water Act] extends to only those wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are ‘waters of the United States’ in their own right, so that they are indistinguishable from those waters.”

But the rule doesn’t comply with the Court’s ruling. There are no wetlands on Mr. White’s property that meet the Supreme Court’s definition. Yet the EPA and the Corps have kept up their actions against him and others.

Mr. White’s case is the third PLF case to force the EPA to comply with Sackett II. He joins Skip and Val Valentine as well as Dan Ward who are all involved in lawsuits over EPA’s post-Sackett Clean Water Act enforcement.

The case is White v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.