It's obvious that Alito simply doesn't like the law, so he refashions it to his own liking.

It turns out that there were five votes on the Supreme Court to support the notion that the Clean Water Act doesn't say what it clearly says and doesn't mean what it clearly means. The carefully manufactured conservative majority cracked enough to let Justice Brett Kavanaugh, of all people, sneak away. But, on Thursday, Justice Sam Alito was able to corral the other five behind a ludicrous opinion with no basis in any law and even less basis in environmental science. The case was Sackett v. EPA and it dealt with the EPA's power to regulate not only the country's bodies of water, but the wetlands that are, as the Clean Water Act clearly states, adjacent to them. These wetlands play a vital role in the survival of the various rivers and lakes to which they are adjacent. They also are nature's own flood control devices. Hence, the EPA's clear intent to protect the wetlands as well as the main bodies of water. Alas, the authors of the law didn't bank on Alito's gift for the language arts. From The New York Times:

Writing for five justices, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said that the Clean Water Act does not allow the agency to regulate discharges into wetlands near bodies of water unless they have “a continuous surface connection” to those waters. The decision was a second major blow to the E.P.A.’s authority and to the power of administrative agencies generally. Last year, the court limited the E.P.A.’s power to address climate change under the Clean Air Act.

For the benefit of the strict constructionists in our audience, it should be noted that Alito simply dispensed with the word "adjacent" and that the phrase "continuous surface connection" appears nowhere in the Clean Water Act. Alito simply doesn't like the law, so he refashions it to his own liking. It is spectacularly dishonest even by Alito's standards, which are considerable. Which was obvious even to Kavanaugh, who wrote in a concurrence:

By narrowing the act’s coverage of wetlands to only adjoining wetlands,” he wrote, “the court’s new test will leave some long-regulated adjacent wetlands no longer covered by the Clean Water Act, with significant repercussions for water quality and flood control throughout the United States.

Justice Elena Kagan concurred with Kavanaugh's concurrence, linking it to another, earlier industry-friendly decision that tap-danced on the Clean Air Act.

...the majority’s non-textualism barred the E.P.A. from addressing climate change by curbing power plant emissions in the most effective way. Here, that method prevents the E.P.A. from keeping our country’s waters clean by regulating adjacent wetlands. The vice in both instances is the same: the court’s appointment of itself as the national decision maker on environmental policy.

As the Times explains:

The decision was nominally unanimous, with all the justices agreeing that the homeowners who brought the case should not have been subject to the agency’s oversight because the wetlands on their property were not subject to regulation in any event.)

This bit of dark legerdemain is deeply ominous, Steve Bannon's "destruction of the administrative state" gussied up in judicial finery. The final blow could fall in the next term. In May, the Court agreed to hear a case called Loper Bright Enterprises, et al. v. Raimondo, Secretary of Commerce., et al in which the power of any and all federal agencies to regulate pretty much anything at all. There clearly are five votes right now for a return to the status quo ante of the Roosevelt administration. The Theodore Roosevelt administration, that is.