It’s the big, flashy, headline-mill Supreme Court cases that tend to generate the biggest reactions from a salacious public, but the under-the-radar, boring ones sometimes have a bigger impact which warrants significant attention.

While everyone was watching the High Court deal with affirmative action, website designers, and patiently telling President Joe Biden he was not a wish-granting wizard with a magic wand when it came to student load debt, it also handed down two opinions concerning executive branch authority which ought to be something of a watershed moment concerning federal government overreach. Providing, of course, that the federal executive branch decides that the law actually matters.

First up we have Sackett v. EPA. Back in about 2008, Michael and Chantell Sackett decided they wanted to build a home on their property near Priest Lake Idaho. So, they began to backfill their property and bring in gravel. Unfortunately for them, their property (yes, I am being somewhat alliterative in the repetitive use of “their property”, but it’s an important point to note we are talking about their property)… where was I, oh yes – unfortunately for them their property happened to have a ditch on it, which happened to lead to a creek, which fed into Lake Priest. Using that chain, the EPA decided the Sackett’s property was a navigable water of the U.S., and therefore under their jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act. They ordered the couple to stop building their home, remove the gravel, and restore the property. Oh, and they threatened to fine the Sackett’s $40,000 per day until they did so.

Stay up to speed: Sign-up for daily opinion in your inbox Monday-Friday

Naturally this kicked off a court battle which eventually found its way to the Supreme Court, which decided – 9-0 mind you – the EPA was out of it’s ever-living mind, and the soil upon which the couple wished to build a house was not, in fact, a body of water upon which international or interstate commerce is or can be conducted. The Justices differ a bit on what exactly is meant by “water of the U.S.,” for the purposes of the Clean Water Act, but Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion, joined by four of his colleagues, defines it this way: “The CWA extends to only those ‘wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are ‘waters of the United States’ in their own right,’ so that they are ‘indistinguishable’ from those waters.” Which pretty much lines up with what reason, logic and good sense would demand.

Lesson: The EPA and the Corps of Engineers are not the planning department for the entire nation.

Second one, West Virginia v. EPA. (Oh, don’t start feeling sorry for the bloody EPA, they bring it on themselves). In this one the State of West Virginia sued the EPA over its Clean Coal Plan, which is a wide-ranging program cooked up by the EPA to force the closure of coal-fired electrical generation plants.

There was just one problem with this, which the Court identified – the EPA had no Congressional authority whatsoever to do so. The Clean Air Act was cited, but nowhere in that law was there language enabling the EPA to create and enforce their program.

What the Court did in this instance was finally put some limits on Congress’s delegation authority. Congress quite routinely cobbles together a law that gives broad directions and visions, and then hands it off to an executive agency to fill in the details. This amounts to an abrogation of Congress’s sole right to make law – or perhaps a usurpation of that right by the executive, though it’s counterintuitive to usurp something that is freely given. Now it’s important to note in WV v. EPA, the Court made no value judgement as to whether or not it was a good idea to burn coal. The Court simply told the EPA that as an executive branch agency it can only execute laws enacted by the legislative branch.

Lesson: Congress cannot have the EPA do its job for it.

Both decisions brought the usual hyperbolic caterwauling and howls of protest from the expected corners, from both the Biden administration and their external allies. We await to see if Congress, and especially the Biden administration – which seems to think itself even less bound by the law than the previous one – will make the necessary adjustments. In the meantime, perhaps both branches should refrain from grumbling about ethics rules for the Supreme Court until they have proven they have taken that court’s civics lessons to heart.

Kelly Sloan is a political and public affairs consultant and a recovering journalist based in Denver.