Somewhere in Twelve Sleep County Joe Pickett is relieved this one didn’t get real western like it could have. I am pleasantly surprised that it was a 9-0 decision but the celebration beyond that point shall be rather muted here at this keyboard. The current headlines:

Major SCOTUS Decision Neuters EPA, Leaves Democrats Spinning in Circles

…The Justices all ended up at the same place, finding that the EPA had erred in its use of regulatory power against a family trying to build a home on their property in Idaho.

[Ed Morrisey at HOTAIR:] In this case, which has been percolating for years, the Obama-era EPA had defined the term “wetland” in the Clean Water Act and Waters of the US rule (WOTUS) as basically any land where water naturally pooled on occasion. That led the EPA in 2004 to block Mike and Chantell Sackett from completing a home on their residential-zoned Idaho lot of less than an acre and socking them with massive per-day fines until they dismantled what had already been built — even though their land was nowhere near a navigable body of water, as the WOTUS rule required.

Lets stop right there. Clearly the EPA was in the wrong…anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty in their veins can see that. Why are we just now getting “justice” almost twenty years later? Almost just as important…let’s double check that year: 2004? Obama-Era EPA? Another source tells me this:

In 2007, the EPA notified the Sacketts that their land was a wetland, and they had filled the wetland in violation of the Clean Water Act. To comply with the Clean Water Act, the EPA mandated that the Sacketts remove the fill material and fence the site for three growing seasons or face $32,500 in fines per day.

Seemingly conflicting data but, I’m sorry to tell you “compassionate” conservative types (or even “maverick” conservatives or “severe” conservatives for that matter) – whether either or both are closer to the truth…it seems we are talking about the Bush-Era EPA.

I have written before about the story of my cowboy governor back at the very end of the last century writing a letter to the big boys at the EPA telling them to pound sand on some now long forgotten issue or another. Just a matter of months later, when he then occupied the biggest office in the land, he rather promptly let Carol Browner off the hook and then whipped his EPA into such great shape that years later in his more mature administration they were still confident enough in their executive leadership’s approval that they were terrorizing U.S. citizens like the Sacketts. Par for the course for the go-along-to-get-along establishment types and their rationalizing enablers in comment sections from sea to shining sea.

There are lessons in them there headlines if you look hard enough…and 2024 looms large.