The WOTUS rule,
published the morning of June 29, potentially subjects every food, energy,
transportation and manufacturing industry in the nation to high-handed
regulation by one of the most reviled and least trusted federal agencies,
dreaded for its cadre of “revolving door” officials hired from anti-industry
green groups.
The astonishing
response began on the afternoon of June 29: states teamed up in clusters to
file their lawsuits in a common U.S. District Court. Utah and eight others
filed with Georgia in Augusta’s U.S. Court; Alaska and 11 others filed with
North Dakota in Bismark. Days later Mississippi and Louisiana filed with Texas
in Galveston; Michigan filed with Ohio in Columbus; Oklahoma filed alone in
Oklahoma City.
Each state lawsuit
asked a federal judge to declare the WOTUS rule illegal and issue an injunction
to prevent the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers, co-administrator of the
rule, from enforcing it. Each state also asked the judge to order both agencies
to draft a new rule that complies with the law and honors state authority.
The WOTUS rule is
so alarming because it enables agency bureaucrats to control virtually anything
that gets wet, including a desert dry wash that gets a “drizzle,” actual EPA
language criticized by House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas)
at a Heartland Institute conference in Washington in June.
Heartland Research
Fellow H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D, commented, “Farmers, ranchers, developers,
industry, and individual property owners would now be subject to the EPA’s
arbitrary, unsound, and often incomprehensible regulatory system. It cannot be
trusted.”
American Farm
Bureau Federation general counsel Ellen Steen announced the group’s lawsuit
with similar distrust: “When EPA and the Corps first proposed the rule in March
2014, they promised clarity and certainty to farmers, ranchers, builders and
other affected businesses and landowners. Instead we have a final rule that
exceeds the agencies’ legal authority and fails to provide the clarity that was
promised.”
More than a dozen
national agricultural and production organizations also filed suit against EPA,
including the National Alliance of Forest Owners, American Road and
Transportation Builders Association, National Association of Home Builders,
National Association of Manufacturers, and Public Lands Council.
The non-profit
Pacific Legal Foundation sued on behalf of the state cattlemen’s associations
of California, Washington, and New Mexico. When contacted for comment, the New
Mexico Cattle Growers Association’s president, Jose Varela Lopez, said what
many ranchers feel. He told The Daily Caller, “My family has been on our land
for 14 generations, each leaving it better for the next. Water is the source of
all life and after all our generations, our water is clear and the land lives
on. We have the history to prove that we are caretakers of the water and the
land without the help of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
The alarm over WOTUS
is not just about strangulation by regulation. Corruption has become a primary
issue: evidence has emerged that EPA officials unlawfully lobbied crony green
groups to send “one million comments” supporting the rule, according to a May
19 New York Times article. The Army Corps of Engineers examined the comments
and found that 98 percent appeared to be non-substantive mass mailings.
Three lawmakers
from the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Chairman Jim Inhofe
(R-Okla.) and two subcommittee chairmen, Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) and Mike
Rounds (R-S.D.), immediately sent a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy
demanding answers about rigging public input with YouTube videos, Twitter
accounts, and many other social media marketing tools.
No comments:
Post a Comment