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Page Number: 18

14 

COUNTY OF MAUI v. HAWAII WILDLIFE FUND 

Opinion of the Court 

clerk includes those who took a taxi from the train station. 
There is nothing unnatural about such a construction.  As 
the  plurality  correctly  noted  in  Rapanos  v.  United  States, 
547 U. S. 715 (2006), the statute here does not say “directly” 
from or “immediately” from.  Id., at 743 (opinion of Scalia, 
J.).  Indeed, the expansive language of the provision—any
addition from any point source—strongly suggests its scope 
is not so limited. 

JUSTICE ALITO appears to believe that there are only two 
possible ways to read “from”: as referring either to the im-
mediate source, or else to the original source.  Post, at 5, 8. 
Because  he  agrees  that  the  statute  cannot  reasonably  be 
read always to reach the original source, he concludes the
statute must refer only to the immediate origin.  But as the 
foregoing  example  illustrates,  context  may  indicate  that 
“from”  includes  an  intermediate  stop—Baltimore,  not  Eu-
rope or the train station.

JUSTICE THOMAS relies on the word “addition,” but we fail 
to  see  how  that  word  limits  the  statute  to  discharges  di-
rectly to navigable waters.  Ordinary language abounds in
counter examples: A recipe might instruct to “add the drip-
pings from the meat to the gravy”; that instruction does not
become incomprehensible, or even peculiar, simply because 
the drippings will have first collected in a pan or on a cut-
ting board.  And while it would be an unusual phrasing (as 
statutory phrasings often are), we do not see how the rec-
ipe’s meaning would transform if it instead said to “add the 
drippings to the gravy from the meat.”  To take another ex-
ample: If Timmy is told to “add water to the bath from the
well” he will know just what it means—even though he will 
have to use a bucket to complete the task. 

And although JUSTICE THOMAS resists the inevitable im-
plications  of  his  reading  of  the  statute,  post,  at  5–6,  that 
reading would create the same loopholes as those offered by 
the petitioner and the Government, and more.  It would nec-
essarily exclude a pipe that drains onto the beach next to