The story of the Clean Waters Act is a perfect example of the administrative state seizing total power that it was never intended to have.
The old 70’s legislation protected “navigable waters” also known as “waters of the United States”. The EPA’s bureaucrats and eco-leftists decided to take the latter definition to mean all the water. Literally.
Got a puddle in your backyard? The EPA has authority over it. Or had authority.
The Supreme Court ruled that “waters refers only to “geographic[al] features that are described in ordinary parlance as ‘streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes’ ” and to adjacent wetlands that are “indistinguishable” from those bodies of water due to a continuous surface connection.”Wetlands are not navigable waters at all, but at least this curtails the escalating Obama/Biden abuses of the CWA.The SCOTUS ruling states that, “to assert jurisdiction over an adjacent wetland under the CWA, a party must establish “first, that […]
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