Clean Water Restoration Act
Scheduled for a vote on June 18, the Clean Water Restoration Act, S.787, will expand the scope and reach of the government’s efforts to deny property rights to Americans.
The “original” Clean Water Act from 1972, originally intended only for navigable waterways, grew like a cancerous tumor, impinging on the property rights of farmers, ranchers and other land owners with creeks and ponds on their property. The ever-expanding reach of the faceless bureaucrats included even dry land that had the potential to be wet.
Two Supreme Court decisions reigned in the Act’s reach in the absence of an intelligent response from Congress. The decisions, Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County v. United States in 2001, and Rapanos v. United States in 2006, went a long way toward restoring some semblance of intelligence to the disastrous 1972 law.
Now, the resurgent Democratic Congress is on the attack. As the Heritage Foundation’s The Foundry Blog notes:
Now, the CWRA seeks to overturn these Supreme Court decisions and make the statute more expansive than ever. In fact, it would turn the Clean Water Act into what some analysts believe to be the most dangerous federal intrusion on private property rights in existence. First, it seeks to remove the limitation that the statute only apply to navigable waters and apply it to all waters of the United States. Then it seeks to broadly define such waters as not just “all waters subject to the ebb and flow of the tide, the territorial seas, and all interstate and intrastate waters and their tributaries, including lakes, rivers, streams (including intermittent streams),” but also “mudflats, sandflats, wetlands, sloughs, prairie potholes, wet meadows, playa lakes, natural ponds….” Yes, prairie potholes. Note also that the CWRA makes clear that intrastate as well as interstate waters are the purview of the feds.
Federal regulators will reach into the fields and backyards of every inch of American soil looking for moist areas to restrict use of the land, a virtual seizure without taking actual possession. This is akin to the eminent domain controversies of the past few years, but with a painful twist: the property owner still has to pay to maintain the property.
