The Reach of Raich: Implications for Legislative Amendments and Judicial Interpretations of the Clean Water Act

In 1972, Congress responded to the growing national water pollution problem by passing the Clean Water Act (CWA) in an effort to protect and maintain the quality of the nation’s waters. Since that time, courts, regulatory agencies, and Congress itself have struggled to interpret, apply, and define the CWA coherently and uniformly, particularly regarding its regulation of wetlands. Within the judiciary, federal courts at all levels have established varying limits on the reach of the CWA’s jurisdiction over wetlands. Similar inconsistencies surfaced in the regulatory agencies responsible for implementing the CWA. In the 1970s, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) promulgated conflicting regulatory interpretations of the extent of the Corps’s jurisdiction over wetlands. And when Congress amended the CWA in 1977, it not only failed to resolve existing ambiguities regarding the reach of the Corps’s jurisdiction, it intensified the interpretive difficulties by defining “navigable waters” broadly as the “waters of the United States,” without determining the extent to which either term applied to the regulation of wetlands.The pervasive inconsistency exhibited in all branches of the government regarding the CWA’s application to wetlands has been exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s distinction between wetlands that are not adjacent to navigable waters and those that are adjacent to navigable waters. Other recent Supreme Court decisions interpreting Congress’s powers under the Commerce Clause have added to the confusion. These decisions have resulted in a split among the lower courts as to the reach of Congress’s commerce powers to regulate non-adjacent wetlands.This Article proposes that the inconsistencies are best overcome by: (1) a scientifically based interpretive framework that will increase the predictability and uniformity of court decisions applying the CWA to wetlands regulations, and (2) an explicit expansion of the meaning of “channels of commerce” to include activities that substantially affect channels of commerce, irrespective of whether such activities substantially affect interstate commerce. Part II discusses the legislative and judicial histories of the CWA. Part III reviews Supreme Court decisions interpreting Congress’s powers to regulate commerce, and federal judicial decisions interpreting the CWA within the context of contemporary Commerce Clause doctrine. Part IV discusses the utility of congressional power to protect wetlands as a class under the CWA in light of the nexus between pollution of navigable waters and wetlands as a potential source point for pollution. Part V concludes that Congress’s commerce powers extend to regulating intrastate, isolated, non-navigable wetlands, and that Congress should grant explicit jurisdiction over such wetlands to the Corps.Some commentators have argued that regulating wetlands is a channel-of-commerce power, as opposed to a substantial effects power, and others have argued that courts should consider groundwater flow between wetlands and navigable surface waters as a sufficient nexus to invoke Congress’s power. This Article seeks to combine and strengthen those arguments by adding scientific underpinnings to support them both, and by considering the implications of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Gonzales v. Raich, which interprets the Commerce Clause as applied to a comprehensive scheme of legislation.