The Supreme Court and the Clean Water Act

While the Court’s decision not to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act — at least, not yet — was probably the best outcome that could have been expected, the same was certainly not true of another of the Court’s decisions yesterday, which went along with a Bush administration decision allowing a company to dump large amounts of extremely toxic chemicals into a a lake on the grounds that the toxic slurry was “fill material” rather than a “pollutant,” and hence a permit could be granted by the Army Corps of Engineers rather than the EPA.