The New York Times reports that more than half of the nation's streams and wetlands could be removed from the protections of the federal Clean Water Act if two legal challenges started more than a decade ago by two Michigan developers are supported by a majority of the newly remade Supreme Court. Oral arguments in the case (the first before Samuel Alito) are scheduled for Tuesday and will pit developers and their industrial, agricultural and ideological allies against both the solicitor general and an armada of environmental lawyers. The central question is where federal authority ends along the network of rivers, streams, canals and ditches.

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