majority rejects the text, the history, and the purpose of the Clean Water Act by declaring that to be considered “adjacent,” wetlands must have “a continuous surface connection” to a navigable body of water with “no clear demarcation” between the two. This ruling is startling and legally incorrect, so much so that Justice Brett Kavanaugh, normally a member of the court’s right wing,
. He complained that the decision “departs from the statutory text, from 45 years of consistent agency practice, and from the Court’s precedents.”What’s even more startling than the majority’s conclusion, though, is the line of thought behind it and the implications of that reasoning. Alito could have just declared that “adjacent” means “continuously connected” as a matter of plain meaning. The court’s conservative majority hasn’t been afraid of defining old words in new ways “because we say so.