Robert Wilde
Breitbart.com
Big Government
4 April 2014
Republican lawmakers joined farmers and land developers to discourage the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from asserting a proposed rule which will increase its regulatory authority over the nation’s streams and wetlands.
“It’s the most breathtaking power grab I’ve seen in a long time,” said Sen. Pat Toomey, (R-PA). In a letter from Toomey and signed by 14 other GOP Senators, they declared that the proposed rule hurts economic activity and oversteps legal bounds. At issue is the federal Clean Water Act, which grants the EPA authority to regulate “U.S. waters.”
Two Supreme Court rulings in 2001 and 2006 restricted the EPA’s ability to regulate isolated ponds or marshes with no direct connection to navigable waterways. The EPA now wants to expand pollution regulations to include the country’s so-called “intermittent and ephemeral streams and wetlands,” which are created during wet seasons, or merely after it rains, but are temporary. As Breitbart News contributor Charles Hurt pointed out in one of his recent “Nuclear Option” columns, just having a pond on one’s property can subject landowners to enormous fines by the EPA. Moreover, Hurt asserted that the EPA has its own propensity for polluting our waterways…
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