Republican-led states want a chance to tell a federal court how the fall of the Chevron doctrine affects their lawsuit over the Biden administration’s wetlands protection rule.
In a motion filed last week, West Virginia and 23 other states asked the U.S. District Court for the District of North Dakota for an opportunity to explain how EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers’ definition of “waters of the U.S.,” or WOTUS, deserves neither deference nor respect following the Supreme Court’s June decision in Loper Bright v. Raimondo.
“Loper Bright acknowledges that agency interpretations merit less respect when they are not ‘issued contemporaneously with the statute at issue’ and have not ‘remained consistent over time,’” the states wrote in their proposed brief.
They added that the Biden rule is “leagues away” from the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972 and that the scope of WOTUS has expanded and contracted among the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations — and again after the Supreme Court in the 2023 case Sackett v. EPA removed protections for most of the nation’s wetlands.
