Samuel Alito took a blowtorch to environmental law.

Last week, in a single blow, the Supreme Court cast aside decades of precedent to eliminate protections for more than a hundred million acres of sensitive wetlands that protect and enrich our water bodies. But the majority's hammer blow to our nation's waters in Sackett v. EPA is not the worst part of the decision. Rather than decide the case on narrow grounds, the court declared a broader war on our environmental laws by announcing a new doctrine that questions any regulation that impacts private property for public benefit.

Strictly speaking, Sackett was about the Clean Water Act. Soon after a bipartisan Congress voted overwhelmingly to protect the "waters of the United States," the federal agencies tasked with implementing the new law interpreted that phrase to cover wetlands "adjacent to" covered waters. Congress later codified that understanding in a 1977 amendment. Because of that language and the act's broad and ambitious stated aims, eight consecutive presidential administrations—including the Trump administration—have agreed that the Clean Water Act protects at least some wetlands that are not part and parcel of a larger water body.

Justice Samuel Alito's opinion for the five-justice Sackett majority rejects the text, the history, and the purpose of the Clean Water Act by declaring that to be considered "adjacent," wetlands must have "a continuous surface connection" to a navigable body of water with "no clear demarcation" between the two. This ruling is startling and legally incorrect, so much so that Justice Brett Kavanaugh, normally a member of the court's right wing, refused to join it. He complained that the decision "departs from the statutory text, from 45 years of consistent agency practice, and from the Court's precedents."

What's even more startling than the majority's conclusion, though, is the line of thought behind it and the implications of that reasoning. Alito could have just declared that "adjacent" means "continuously connected" as a matter of plain meaning. The court's conservative majority hasn't been afraid of defining old words in new ways "because we say so." But rather than win the game by five-justice fiat, Alito did the legal equivalent of sweeping the pieces from the board. Building on a few recent Supreme Court opinions (some his own), he announced that any government regulation that affects private property must be justified by an "exceedingly clear statement" from Congress.

Think about that: when five justices found words in a law that offended their views on environmental protection, they made up a new rule to deliver the result they wanted.

The whole point of environmental law is to regulate the exercise of private property rights so as to protect the shared public interest in a clean environment. The Congresses that wrote the bedrock environmental laws of the 1970s—laws like the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and so on—knew that when they announced ambitious goals in sweeping language. The explicit goal of the Clean Water Act, for example, is "to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation's waters." And not over some long period of time: Congress demanded "that the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters be eliminated by 1985."

Congress was well aware that achieving its goals would cost companies money and restrict private property rights, which is why it included sweetheart carveouts for certain kinds of landowners (like farmers). It was also well aware that it couldn't write up science-based and cost-sensitive rules itself. So Congress told EPA (an agency it had just created) to do what was necessary to clean up the waters. The act is full of sweeping instructions to EPA to do things like "develop comprehensive programs for preventing, reducing, or eliminating the pollution of the navigable waters and ground waters."

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For decades, courts have read this kind of language in our environmental laws to give agencies like EPA the authority to achieve Congress’ goals. And judges have kept those goals in mind when reading statutory language and reviewing EPA actions. After all, they aren't the only ones watching: The political branches are paying attention too. The president has to answer for EPA's work on election day. Senators and representatives do as well, because they control EPA's authority and budget. Courts, by contrast, aren't accountable to voters; when examining agency actions, they should tread lightly.

Alito's "exceedingly clear statement" rule puts an end to all that. From now on, he says, courts should ignore not only the context and aims of broadly worded laws—they should ignore their literal meaning. From now on, judges should instead read those laws in ways that narrow Congress’ environmental ambitions and restrict its grants of authority to agencies like EPA, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the Fish and Wildlife Service.

On the surface, this might seem to be a strange move for a group of justices who claim to be judicial conservatives. For years, their movement has insisted that judges should adhere to the literal meaning of the words in a law, because doing anything else might give judges the freedom to effectuate a policy agenda. Which, judicial conservatives previously insisted, judges must not do. Textualism, they said, keeps judges out of the business of the political branches.

You can see why the Sackett majority all but abandoned textualism: actual adherence to that approach limits their ability to carry out the policy agenda of the industries that nurtured their rise. And make no mistake, it is a policy agenda. Polluting industries have lobbied Congress relentlessly to weaken the Clean Water Act and other environmental laws. They have backed presidents who promised to rewrite agency regulations governing things like wetlands. Voters, on the other hand, want a clean and healthy environment, which is why our environmental laws have stood for decades, and why even Donald Trump's administration refused to read the Clean Water Act as narrowly as Sackett does.

Sackett's new "exceedingly clear statement" rule gives polluting industries what Congress, presidents, and voters have denied them: weaker environmental laws. This new rule, along with the novel "major questions doctrine" announced last year in West Virginia v. EPA, is a wrecking ball they can use to demolish laws they don't like. Who decides when an environmental law is "exceedingly clear?" Who decides when a regulation implicates "major questions" of policy? The judge assigned to a case. Major polluters—including the fossil giants who profit from climate change and toxic pollution—have pushed politicians to appoint anti-environment lower court judges, and now they have the Supreme Court in their pocket. If West Virginia v. EPA gave polluters a knife, Sackett gives them a machine gun.

It's bad enough that the Sackett majority has decided to deregulate our wetlands. But they’ve done much more. They have laid out a roadmap for deregulating the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the climate we all share. At a time when the world is afire with environmental crises, the Supreme Court is serving corporate interests by shutting off the fire hydrants.