Don't drink the water

Hey, Americans like drinking poison, swimming in chemicals, and living near large flowing collections of carcinogens, right? Of course we do. Hell, that's why we all hate the Clean Water Act so much. Who wants old man government sticking his nose into the business of corporations and telling them that they can't tell us how much sewage we get to gloriously consume in our water?

You'll be happy to hear the great news then.

Thousands of the nation’s largest water polluters are outside the Clean Water Act’s reach because the Supreme Court has left uncertain which waterways are protected by that law, according to interviews with regulators.
...
Companies that have spilled oil, carcinogens and dangerous bacteria into lakes, rivers and other waters are not being prosecuted, according to Environmental Protection Agency regulators working on those cases, who estimate that more than 1,500 major pollution investigations have been discontinued or shelved in the last four years.

The Clean Water Act was intended to end dangerous water pollution by regulating every major polluter. But today, regulators may be unable to prosecute as many as half of the nation’s largest known polluters because officials lack jurisdiction or because proving jurisdiction would be overwhelmingly difficult or time consuming, according to midlevel officials.

See there's a little dispute over language. When lawmakers originally wrote the law they used the phrase "navigable waters" to define the scope of government jurisdiction. What they meant and what regulators meant is everything from wetlands to streams to rivers. I believe the legal language was "shit you can get a fuckin' canoe into."

On the other hand the Supreme Court, in what I'm going to guess was a 5-4 ruling, thinks "navigable waters" means only a large river or a particularly big ass lake, and so help you God if that river or lake doesn't place it's ass in at least two states. Or, in other words, the Supreme Court doesn't think the Clean Water Act applies to most water. As such, regulators have had to end investigations, pull out of some states entirely, and, in what is a shocking surprise, somehow water pollution and contamination has risen because dumping poison into a stream that leads into a river is now legal. Essentially the Clean Water Act is now pretty much useless.

But don't worry, the Senate is going to pass a law that removes the "navigable" part from the law and... you know what I'm not even going to finish that sentence. They're going to attempt it, big business will shriek, Glen Beck will rant about the government stealing everyone's water, and the Democrats won't be able to get 60 votes for it.

So.... hope you like drinking soda. That's pretty much going to be the consumable beverage for a lot of areas of the country soon. On the other hand: invest in Brita water filters. I have a feeling that's going to be a boom stock. Isn't this a great country?