580
Opinion of the Court
of navigation in deciding whether to issue a permit under § 10.5
C
We now examine the administrative interpretation of § 10 down through the years with respect to the range of discretion extended to the Corps and the Secretary. An opinion by Attorney General George W. Wickersham in 1909, for example, denied the Secretary of War and the Chief of Engineers the authority to decide whether to issue a permit under RHA § 10 after "consider[ation of] questions relating to other interests than those having to do with the navigation of the waters." 27 Op. Atty. Gen. 284, 288.
This narrow view of the Secretary's authority persisted within the agency for many decades. "Until 1968," according to one document produced by the Corps of Engineers, "the Corps administered the 1899 Act regulatory program only to protect navigation and the navigable capacity of the nation's waters." 42 Fed. Reg. 37122 (1977). In 1968, the regulations were amended so that the general policy guidance for permit issuance included consideration of "the effects of permitted activities on the public interest including
5 Alaska reads Pennsylvania Chemical Corp. differently, suggesting that the case does not relate to the scope of the Corps' permitting authority under RHA § 10, but instead is confined to the issue of how broadly the agency's prosecutorial discretion should be defined. We disagree. Our analysis of the RHA in that case was not at all contingent on the underlying issue relating to a prosecution rather than a permitting decision. We placed great weight on the reading by the federal courts, which "almost universally agreed, as did the courts below, that § 13 is to be read in accordance with its plain language as imposing a flat ban on the unauthorized deposit of foreign substances into navigable waters, regardless of the effect on navigation." 411 U. S., at 671. Alaska also cites Wisconsin v. Illinois, 278 U. S. 367, 418 (1929), for the proposition that § 10 only authorizes considerations of navigability in permit issuance decisions. We do not read the case in the same way. In our view, Wisconsin v. Illinois is more properly read to limit the Secretary's authority to issue a permit for nonnavigability reasons when an effect of the project would be to obstruct navigation. Id., at 417.
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