> perversion of the basic concept of the rule of law.
You have this completely backwards. In the 70s when the CWA was created, the EPA did not consider every single ditch in America to be covered by the CWA. Congress didn’t modify the law to include every single ditch in America. They did, however, modify it in 1977 to include all “adjacent wetlands”. This was clearly intended to allow the CWA to apply to any wetland adjacent to a river or lake carrying interstate or international trade. But nobody back then thought that it covered the ditch in your back yard. It wasn’t until 2006 that the EPA started gradually expanding the scope of their activities, culminating in the present case where they are trying to assert their authority over every single place where water flows, or could flow.
The rule of law requires that people know what the law is, and it thus follows that it requires that the agencies which enforce the law may not gradually expand their definitions in order to grab more and more power. If you want the EPA to have more power, then tell your congresscritter to give it to them. Anything else is a perversion of the rule of law.
Look for empty dirt filled ditches on the east coast and they’re overwhelmingly man made because across geologic timescales anything that causes that much erosion disappears quickly.
> All the court did here was rule that the law doesn’t cover ditches which might occasionally have rainwater in them.
Hardly, what the court did was override both the intent of the law and people who understood what was required to implement it. It’s a perversion of the basic concept of the rule of law.