Democrats have been all aflutter for the past six months over the possibility that President Donald Trump might ignore a Supreme Court decision that isn’t to his liking. Where’s the similar concern for federal bureaucrats who act as if they’re immune from judicial orders?

In 2023, the Supreme Court reined in the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to commandeer the Clean Water Act to claim authority over virtually every puddle and pond in the nation under the guise of regulating “navigable water.” The case was the culmination of a 16-year fight by an Idaho couple who sought only to build a home on their own property.

The controversy began in 2007, when Chantell and Mike Sackett moved to construct a three-bedroom house on a Priest Lake, Idaho, lot they purchased three years earlier. The couple jumped through the typical hoops to obtain the necessary local permits. But EPA officials soon arrived to dash their plans, arguing their project threatened protected wetlands and threatening them with massive fines for every day they continued to move dirt.

To make matters worse, the feds claimed the Sacketts had no legal right to challenge the finding in court, and instead had to go through an administrative proceeding run by the agency itself — all while the fines stacked up.

With the help of the Pacific Legal Foundation, the couple sued and five years later won a unanimous decision from the Supreme Court affirming their right to review in a federal court. But their trials and tribulations weren’t over.

The case bounced around the federal courts for nearly a decade before the Supreme Court in 2022 agreed to weigh in one more time, addressing whether the agency had the constitutional authority to intervene in the first place. The following year, the justices again ruled in favor of the Sacketts, with the majority holding that only those waters with a “continuous surface” nexus to actual “waters of the United States” fell under the authority of the EPA through the Clean Water Act.

“Yet the EPA and Army Corps are ignoring the Supreme Court” the Pacific Legal Foundation reports, “and continuing to assert broad federal authority over enormous areas of private land in every corner of the country” under the pretense of regulating wetlands. Ironically, the foundation has now taken up the case of another Idaho couple running into EPA roadblocks over their development plans for 4.7 acres of private property.

The parallels between the two cases “are striking,” the PLF argues and highlight efforts by federal agents to “willfully and directly” flout the Supreme Court ruling that restrained the agency from claiming virtually unlimited regulatory authority over property that had no real connection to “navigable waters.” Let’s hope the foundation once again prevails.

Trump should indeed follow Supreme Court edicts. The same goes for those at federal agencies who seek to stretch the law to claim powers that they don’t have.

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