Once more Delaware has been ruled victorious in its ongoing battle with its uglier neighbor to the Northeast: New Jersey. Today, the U.S. Supreme Court, exercising its rarely used jurisdiction to adjudicate disputes between the states, upheld a prior ruling that New Jersey could not build a pier from its shore on the Delaware River out into the river itself so as to service a proposed natural gas processing plant. For you see, the Delaware River is owned by Delaware. Delaware owns the entire riverbed from its shore to the low water mark on the Jersey side of the river.
From the New York Times:
For many decades, the states of Delaware and New Jersey have fought over the river that separates them. On Monday, Delaware won the latest battle, as the Supreme Court said it could block New Jersey’s plan to build a huge gas-processing plant on the Jersey side of the Delaware River.
By 6 to 2, the court ruled that Delaware could bar the $600 million plant that BP wanted to build in Logan Township, N.J. A crucial part of the project — fatal, as it turned out, for New Jersey — was a 2,000-foot pier that would have extended from the New Jersey shore to the navigable part of the river, so that tankers could dock and unload.
There was no dispute that Delaware owns the entire riverbed, from its own banks to the low-water mark on the Jersey side, under a 1934 Supreme Court decision. But a 1905 compact between the states, still in effect, provides that each state may, on its own side of the river, continue to exercise riparian, or shoreline, jurisdiction "of every kind and nature" under its own laws.
....
[Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority, stated that] "Delaware may not impede ordinary and usual exercises of the right of riparian owners to wharf out from New Jersey’s shore [....] The project British Petroleum sought to construct and operate, however, goes well beyond the ordinary or usual."
Now two Justices dissented, and you can guess who they are. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb, or in real word parlance, Scalia and Alito. Apparently, if an oil company wants something, they get it, in their learned scholarly view. But read their tone. Hardly the words of learned men. More like the words of petulant children who are not getting what they want.
Justice Antonin Scalia, in a dissent joined by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., professed to be flabbergasted by the majority’s reasoning. What was so "extraordinary" about a wharf to unload liquefied natural gas, he asked. "Would a pink wharf, or a zig-zagged wharf qualify? How about one for the transfer of "tofu and bean sprouts"?
So I suppose if I wish to defend Delaware's property rights and the already threatened environment of our Delaware River, I am a tofu eating liberal flabbergaster. How learned of Mr. Scalia. Indeed, I wonder what constitutional provision he bases these charges on.
But that aside, the war between Delaware and New Jersey continues. New Jersey has threatened to withdraw its pension funds from the Delaware banks that currently service them, and has even threatened to call up the New Jersey National Guard to patrol the Delaware-New Jersey border. There has even been talk or recommissioning the U.S.S. New Jersey, a World War II battleship that is now a museum on the Camden waterfront across from Philadelphia, for an anticipated shelling of Wilmington.
Stay tuned.....