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Another big win for corporate interests in Montana

Kerr Dam, PPL Montana

This morning, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to hand over ownership and control of your riverbeds to private, for-profit corporations. After all, “Corporations are people, my friend,” just like you and me. In PPL Montana v. Montana, 10-218 the court decided that there is no longer any such thing as a navigable river, only chunks and bits of navigable rivers.

The decision hinged not on whether the river itself was a corridor of commerce, only where Lewis and Clark had to get out of their canoes for more than 24 hours. If a portion of a river was not navigable at 10:40 am on Nov. 8, 1889, then that river could never be navigable and therefore the citizens of Montana hold no claim to that small portion of river. Ignore the fact that rivers change, that’s what rivers do and I’m pretty sure a lot of our rivers were pretty tightly iced up in November 1889, but that’s neither here nor there. The Corporate Court will decide which portions of which rivers in Montana (and every other state) states can control based on how much it costs Corporate America.

To determine riverbed title under the equal-footing doctrine, this Court considers the river on a segment-by-segment basis to assess whether the segment of the river, under which the riverbed in dispute lies, is navigable or not.

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Montana attorneys, on the other hand, argue that portages around naturally occurring obstructions were part of the commercial navigation of the river at the time. The heavy use of the Missouri from Lewis and Clark’s time, through the state’s gold rush and past statehood in 1889, proves the Missouri’s commercial navigability, they said.

The ruling will surely result in quite a bit of turmoil over regulation of navigable rivers within Montana and other states. From now on, states will have to prove in court, paid for by you, that any small portion of any stream was navigable at statehood before they can have any say over how any regulation is applied or enforced on that stretch of river.

For a good overall review of the SCOTUS case, here’s an informative video from PBS about the court case.