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Obama’s Other Hand
Posted 04/29/2011
Regulation: While we were distracted by the president’s birth
certificate show-and-tell, his EPA releases its guidelines for
expanding federal power under the Clean Water Act. America’s economy
and freedom are at stake.
President Obama’s long-form birth certificate wasn’t the only thing
released last Wednesday, but it was probably the least important. The
Environmental Protection Agency also released its guidelines for
expanding federal power over the nation’s waterways, ponds and puddles.
These guidelines will take effect after a 60-day comment period and
will serve as a reference for environmental agencies in determining
their jurisdiction over a particular body of water, large or small.
They will eventually morph into binding regulations as damaging to our
economy and freedom as the EPA regulation of carbon dioxide emissions.
The 1972 Clean Water Act was originally intended to protect the
“navigable waters of the United States” — you know, the kind boats
travel down. It was broadly and quickly interpreted to any pool of
water in America capable of supporting a bathtub-variety boat.
The word “navigable” was forgotten and ignored, and the act’s scope
expanded to the point that water that collected after a rainstorm was
considered a “wetland” worthy of environmental protection.
A 2006 U.S. Supreme Court case from Michigan produced five different
opinions and no clear definition of which waterways were covered. This
essentially left the government with a clean slate on which to write
its own interpretation — just about everything.
House Agricultural Committee Chairman Frank Lucas, R-Okla., says the
expanded EPA guidelines would let the government “regulate essentially
any body of water, such as a farm pond or even a ditch.” A bipartisan
group of 170 congressmen wrote a letter to the EPA and the Army Corps
of Engineers urging them not to issue the expanded guidelines.
The American Farm Bureau Federation said in a statement that the
guidelines “take an overly broad view of ‘waters of the U.S.’ It would
serve as a road map for EPA and the Corps to designate nearly all water
bodies, and even some on dry land, as subject to federal regulations
that dictate land-use decisions.”
Not just agriculture but energy production is affected. The EPA
recently revoked the coal mining permit for Arch Coal’s Spruce Mine No.
1 in Logan County, W.Va. The permit was issued four years ago and since
then Arch Coal, which provides 16% of America’s supply, has followed
every jot and tittle of the rules it was told to operate under. It
didn’t matter.
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