More Wetlands Purgatory for American Landowners

James Bovard  – September 3, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research

 

How many drops of water does it take to justify federal bureaucrats commandeering your own land? Unfortunately, a federal judge changed the answer on Monday – the latest flip-flop in a saga stretching back more than 30 years and five presidencies.  Federal wetlands policy epitomizes how Washington policymakers don’t give a damn about safeguarding Americans’ rights with clear rules to curb bureaucratic tyranny.

In 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Act to, among other things, restrict the pollution of navigable waters. That law gave the Army Corps of Engineers the power to approve or deny building permits, and the EPA received the power to veto Army Corps permits. In 1975, a federal judge revealed that the Clean Water Act also applied to wetlands that were adjacent to navigable waters.

In 1988, Presidential candidate George H.W. Bush declared that “all existing wetlands, no matter how small, should be preserved” and promised “no net loss” of wetlands if elected president. On January 21, 1989, the day after Bush’s inauguration, the EPA and the Army Corps revealed a new and vastly broader definition of wetlands. Land that was dry 350 days a year could be classified as a “federal jurisdictional wetland.” Fairness to Land Owners, a Maryland advocacy group, estimated that the new definition magically increased the amount of wetlands in the U.S. from roughly 100 million acres to 200 million acres, the vast majority owned by private citizens.

Federal bureaucrats concocted bizarre rules to vastly expand their own power over landowners, including the “glancing geese” test. If migrating geese glance down and consider stopping at a water hole, and the geese are on a flight that crosses state lines, then federal agencies automatically have jurisdiction over that water hole and the surrounding land. In a 1992 decision striking down an EPA penalty on a Chicago-area homebuilder, federal judge Daniel Manion declared, “The EPA claims jurisdiction over the intrastate wetland solely on the ground that migratory birds could, potentially, use the wetland as a place to feed, or nest or as a stopover on the way to the Gulf States for the winter months” but “there is not even any evidence that migratory birds, or any other wildlife, actually used [the area] for any purpose.” A federal appeals court decision narrowed Manion’s ruling and permitted the EPA to retain its “glancing geese” test.

Congress specified in the Clean Water Act that normal farming practices and operations should be exempt from federal wetlands restrictions. But the Army Corps of Engineers evaded that restraint by issuing a “clarification” of federal law that announced that, from the Corps’ perspective, cranberries, apples, blueberries, hay, and alfalfa are not agricultural commodities — and thus that those farmers were subject to the Corps’ control.

In 1993, the Clinton administration issued new guidance that banned any activity with “environmental concern” on wetlands. A federal attorney declared that, under the new policy, the Army Corps “could require a permit to ride a bicycle across a wetland.” A White House press release suggested that “Congress should amend the Clean Water Act to make it consistent with the agencies’ rulemaking.” That was a novel perspective on the Constitution, which previously required federal regulations to comply with laws that Congress actually passed.

Thanks to the Clinton regs, the Army Corps and the EPA imposed controls over sections of a development as small as 26 square feet — roughly half the size of a ping-pong table. One Rhode Island town was forced to wait for almost two years to get federal permission to do mosquito-control work on 0.009 acres of wetlands. Asserting federal jurisdiction over a tiny area could effectively prohibit the owner from building on a much greater portion of his property. The legal costs of getting government permission to build on or near suspected wetlands easily exceeded $50,000 — a prohibitive cost for most individual landowners.

Former Justice Department attorney William Laffer observed, “Any time the Army Corps or EPA thinks a parcel of land is beneficial to wildlife, they arbitrarily apply the wetlands definition to prohibit the owner from using the land.” Rep. James Hayes (R-LA) complained, “In Nevada, [housing] developments in the midst of cactus and parched earth are now being classified as ‘wetlands’ because standing water can occur for seven days in a hole dug for a foundation.” The Congressional Budget Office estimated that it would cost at least $10 billion to compensate owners for the loss of their property values as a result of wetlands rulings. However, with the way bureaucrats rig the game, property owners were denied even a single dollar of compensation after being banned from using their land.

Wetlands policy became little more than institutionalized lawlessness. In December 1997, a federal appeals court overturned a landowner’s conviction, ruling that “the Corps’ [sic] regulation of such wetlands is based solely on its definition of wetlands as ‘waters of the United States’” — for which the court found no basis in the Clean Water Act. Five months later, the EPA and Army Corps issued a guidance memo detailing their plans to evade the court decision. Agency personnel were told to completely disregard the decision in any area outside of the jurisdiction of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals (i.e., Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and South Carolina). Even within those states, the EPA and Army Corps planned to continue prohibiting owners from using their land when the feds claimed the land would be used “by migratory waterfowl, other game birds… sought by hunters, bird watchers, or photographers.” According to the Clinton administration, it took only a few clicks of a camera to nullify property rights.

In 2012, the Supreme Court struck down a key provision in the regulatory regime, declaring that there was no reason to believe that “the Clean Water Act was uniquely designed to enable the strong-arming of regulated parties [property owners] into ‘voluntary compliance’ without the opportunity for judicial review.’’ In comments to the media when he announced the Court’s decision, Justice Antonin Scalia mocked the EPA’s definition of “wetlands,” noting that the Idaho homeowners had never “seen a ship or other vessel cross their yard.” Justice Samuel Alito, in a concurring opinion, declared, “The reach of the Clean Water Act is notoriously unclear,” and its harsh penalties “leaves most property owners with little practical alternative but to dance to the EPA’s tune.” Alito urged Congress to clarify the legal definition of “wetlands” — and thus to set a limit once and for all to federal regulators’ controls over private landowners.

Congress failed to clarify the law. In 2015, the Obama administration issued its “Clean Water Rule,” perpetuating arbitrary federal jurisdiction over wet spots across the nation. In 2019, the Trump administration issued new regulatory guidance titled the Navigable Waters Protection Rule (NWPR), curtailing the power of federal agencies. This past June, the Biden administration announced its conclusion that the Trump-era rules were “leading to significant environmental degradation.” Jaime Pinkham, acting assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, announced, “Communities deserve to have our nation’s waters protected.” Thus, there was supposedly no alternative to reimposing the regulatory straitjacket on America’s property owners. A Politico analysis noted that Biden appointees sought a new policy “informed by lessons from the previous whipsaw of regulations.” Politico reported that “it’s unclear what will happen to the thousands of jurisdictional determinations that have already been made under the narrower Trump rule” permitting landowners to build or modify their property but that “reversing them is a top priority for environmental groups.”

On Monday, federal judge Rosemary Márquez condemned the Trump-era wetland rules for “fundamental, substantive flaws,” vacating the 2019 policy in part because of “the likelihood that the [Biden administration] Agencies will alter the NWPR’s definition of ‘waters of the United States.’” An attorney for Earthjustice, which filed the lawsuit, boasted, “We came in and said, ‘No, no, no, no, you can’t leave this in place.’ This is hugely good.”

In the 1950s, liberals spurred a backlash against Sen. Joseph McCarthy by highlighting cases of innocent individuals who had lost their jobs as a result of his baseless accusations of communism. Vastly more Americans have lost their livelihoods as a result of federal wetlands prohibitions imposed on landowners with the flimsiest of legal pretexts. Yet there has been little uproar — and scant attention on Capitol Hill — over how bureaucratic tyranny is wrecking the lives of landowners.

Perhaps the best acronym for Biden’s pending wetland regs will be WBTP – for “Welcome Back to Purgatory.” Almost 30 years ago, federal Judge Roger Vinson denounced the federal government’s wetlands interpretations as a “regulatory hydra … worthy of Alice in Wonderland.” Nobody in Washington has cared enough to slay the hydra. Wetlands policy vivifies how the Fifth Amendment’s proviso that property cannot be taken “without due process of law” is void when bureaucrats are unleashed.

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James Bovard

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including Public Policy Hooligan, Attention Deficit Democracy, The Bush Betrayal, and Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, New Republic, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, a frequent contributor to The Hill, and a contributing editor for American Conservative

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Recalling EPA’s Gold King Mine disaster: Part 1

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Five years after the infamous blowout, EPA finally settles with Utah over Gold King pollution 
 

Duggan Flanakin

On the fifth anniversary of the notorious spill of 3 million gallons of heavily contaminated acid mine water from the Gold King Mine in southwestern Colorado, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and State of Utah announced an agreement that ends the state’s lawsuit.

Neither the EPA nor the contractors involved at the Gold King spill site are entirely off the hook for their alleged missteps that resulted in downstream damages. Lawsuits filed by the Navajo Nation, the State of New Mexico, and a group of Navajo farmers and ranchers have been consolidated, and discovery is proceeding, with a projected trial date sometime in late 2021.

Pursuant to the agreement, Utah will dismiss its legal actions against the EPA and the United States; mining companies Kinross Gold Corporation, Kinross Gold U.S.A., Inc., Sunnyside Gold Corporation, and Gold King Mines Corporation; and EPA’s contractors: Environmental Restoration, LLC, Weston Solutions, Inc. and Harrison Western Corporation. EPA also agreed to strengthen Utah’s involvement in the EPA’s work to address contamination at the Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund Site, which includes the Gold King Mine and other abandoned mines.

The agency further agreed to act on the Utah Department of Environmental Quality’s application for $3 million in Clean Water Act funds for various projects, including the development of water quality criteria for Utah Lake, septic density studies, nonpoint source pollution reduction projects, and nutrient management plans for agricultural sources. 

The agency also agreed to initiate Superfund assessments by the end of 2021 at the Rico Argentine Mine Site, the Camp Bird Mining Site, the Carribeau (or Caribou) Mine Area, all located in Colorado, and possibly other sites that have the potential to impact downstream waters in Utah. Coupled with its work at the recently established Bonita Peak Mining District Superfund Site (which includes Gold King), the EPA expects to conduct and oversee more than $220 million in abandoned mining site work that will potentially improve Utah’s water quality by reducing the flow of heavy metals and other pollutants from old mines in the state’s waterways.

EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler called the agreement “a win-win for EPA and Utah” that “will bring environmental benefits to Utah, avoid protracted litigation, and hopefully serve as a lesson for the future to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.” EPA General Counsel Matthew Leopold promised that the agency’s “partnership with Utah will be stronger as we continue to support the State in addressing its water quality needs.”

Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes said the state is “very pleased that millions of dollars can now be spent towards mitigation, remediation and assuring water quality in Utah, rather than years of more litigation, trials and appeals.” This, he added, “is what cooperative federalism looks like – a true federal and state partnership” that protects the people, public health and the environment.

The relationship between the EPA and Utah was not always so amicable. Within days after Cement Creek and the Animas River were turned yellow all the way from Colorado through New Mexico and Utah all the way to Lake Powell, Utah Governor Gary R. Herbert declared a state of emergency and added that he was “deeply disappointed by the actions of the Environmental Protection Agency. It was a preventable mistake, and they must be held accountable.”

CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Paul Driessen described the incident this way: A contractor under EPA supervision used a backhoe to dig away tons of rock and debris that were blocking the entrance portal of the Gold King Mine, which had been mostly abandoned since 1923. Because of steady seepage, the EPA should have known that the water was highly acidic (pH 4.0-4.5) and laced with heavy metals. It could and should certainly have checked.

Eventually, the greatly weakened portal burst open, unleashing at least 3 million gallons of toxic water that contaminated the Animas and San Juan Rivers all the way to Lake Powell, which straddles the Utah-Arizona border on the Colorado River. The EPA waited an entire day before notifying downstream mayors, health officials, families, farmers, ranchers, fishermen and kayakers of the toxic spill.

Driessen lambasted the Obama Administration, other Democratic Party officials, and eco-activists for their initial response to the incident, which also caused major damage to Navajo Indian lands. But while EPA’s own internal report called the incident “likely inevitable,” an Interior Department review released in October 2015 found it was both “preventable: and also “emblematic” of the federal government’s “inconsistent and deeply flawed approaches to reopening shuttered mines.” Driessen and others agreed.

Specifically, the Interior Department said that contractors at the Gold King site chose not to bore a hole to physically check water levels and contamination inside the mine before digging – a protocol established in 2011 during a successful mine reopening. “Had it been done, the plan to open the mine would have been revised, and the blowout would not have occurred.” Before undertaking its incompetent cleanup, EPA had threatened Gold King property owner Todd Hennis with a $35,000 per day fine unless he granted them access to the property (which the agency and its contractors then turned into a disaster zone).

In a follow-up article, Driessen found the testimony of Interior Secretary Sally Jewell shocking, as she stated she was unaware of anyone being fired, fined or even demoted – and that federal investigations and reports refused to hold anyone responsible for the ensuing disaster. Even worse, while then-EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said she EPA “absolutely, deeply sorry,” she disavowed any personal or agency responsibility and sent the Navajo emergency water tanks contaminated with oil. Then FEMA denied the Navajo any disaster relief, which prompted nearly 300 affected farmers and ranchers to file a separate (now consolidated) lawsuit.

(Driessen’s in-depth September 2015 MasterResource.org articles (here, here and here) provide extensive details – and damning conclusions – about the scope of EPA and contractor incompetence, negligence, double standards, whitewashing ... and refusal to accept responsibility, compensate victims, or even observe the very rules that EPA typically imposes with an iron fist on corporations, municipalities and citizens. (Most of the damning photographs of activities leading up to and after the blowout appear to have been scrubbed from the internet. However, quite a few can still be found here and elsewhere.)

In the early days of the Trump Administration (while Obama holdovers were still running the show), the EPA finally released an Inspector General’s report on the Gold King incident. Rob Gordon, longtime head of the National Wilderness Institute and currently an advisor to the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, said the IG’s report was yet another whitewash, more for its omissions than its inclusions.

Gordon noted, for example, that the IG’s report had omitted EPA’s critical, erroneous and indefensible assumption that the mine was only partially full of water, and failed to mention that the EPA crew reburied the natural plug after unearthing it. His final assessment was that there are “gaping holes in the EPA’s fiction” which, if allowed to stand, will send a message that “misleading, deceiving and lying works, and that bureaucrats need not follow the laws they enforce on others.”

Navajo and New Mexico officials were equally dissatisfied with the EPA’s initial response to their cries for just compensation for immediate and future losses of both revenue and their traditional use of land and water impacted by the spill. New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas lambasted the EPA for seeking to “impose weak testing standards in New Mexico.” That litigation is still ongoing.

(Part 2 of this article will report on the issues and progress of their now-combined lawsuit.)

Duggan Flanakin is director of policy research for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)            

EPA Can’t Deny Farmers Their Day in Court

Here is a prime opportunity for the White House to show farmers that it stands with them and with sensible, science-based environmental regulation, and against bureaucracy gone wild.

By Gerald Baron • September 1, 2020
 
With so much bad news circulating these days, how about some good news from an unlikely source? The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has been a bastion of judicial activism for decades. But maybe that’s changing.

Late last month, a three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency is not allowed to cover up evidence that they screwed up and then dodge a lawsuit by claiming the statute of limitations had expired.

The judges denied a motion by the agency to dismiss a lawsuit being brought by Washington state dairy farmers. What the farmers allege, with plenty of evidence courtesy of Freedom of Information Act requests, is a long list of actions by the EPA that are unethical, and possibly even criminal.

The Washington State Dairy Federation argues that the local branch of the EPA put together a shaky study of nitrate contamination in Yakima Valley groundwater. The farmers argue, again with plenty of documentary evidence, that EPA bureaucrats then rewrote that study over the objection of outside scientific experts to put the blame on farmers. They further state that the EPA strong-armed local farmers into signing consent decrees that cost them millions of dollars by misrepresenting the study..........To Read More.....

A Water Rule the EPA Got Right

Contrary to reports, the EPA is not raising the limits on the level of a certain herbicide allowed in drinking water. Unfortunately, Tucker Carlson and others may have been taken in by left-wing propaganda on the issue.

Steve Milloy January 25th, 2020

I’m a big fan of Tucker Carlson. Like his fellow disruptor, President Trump, he’s willing to take on all sides of the establishment, Left, Right, and the deep state. And, in my opinion at least, he’s almost always right over the target.

 

But in one particular case, an issue he addressed recently—the EPA’s review of the herbicide atrazine—he hit way wide of the mark, accusing the agency of risking the public health by loosening standards for atrazine in water.

 

As editor of JunkScience.com, I’ve worked on environmental regulatory issues for three decades now. No one would accuse me of being a fan of the EPA. In fact, I’ve sued the EPA, called for reforms, and otherwise endlessly written about the agency’s willingness to throw science under the bus to achieve its often left-wing political agenda. As a member of the Trump transition team on EPA issues, I developed a long list of badly needed reforms for the agency, many of which have been instituted.

 

But that doesn’t mean that EPA always gets it wrong.

 

The agency’s position on the chemical atrazine is one instance in which—despite its track record—the regulators appear to be coming out largely in the right place. First, a few baseline facts about what EPA’s review says and doesn’t say.

 

Contrary to some reports and Tucker’s shot on atrazine, the EPA is not raising the limits on the level of atrazine allowed in drinking water. These will remain exactly where they are now, which is an almost infinitesimal 3 parts per billion on a yearly average. Neither is the monitoring program coming to an end. Atrazine levels will continue to be monitored as before under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), which requires testing for a large number of naturally occurring chemicals, microorganisms, and possible synthetic contaminants.

 

Here’s what’s changing: In 2003, EPA set up a separate Atrazine Monitoring Program (AMP) to more frequently sample drinking water in communities with heavy atrazine use to make sure the SDWA monitoring wasn’t missing anything. It wasn’t.

 

The AMP—which tested for both atrazine and its breakdown products—demonstrated a clear lack of health concerns. The vast majority of samples came in below 1 part per billion, none exceeded the SDWA standard, and the clear trend was declining atrazine levels over time. EPA reasonably decided that the extra monitoring wasn’t needed. The decision will be reviewed in a year.

 

In any case, monitoring will continue as always under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

 

It’s important to understand that EPA sets its limits on contaminants by building in huge safety margins. This is especially true for pesticides (herbicides are one kind of pesticide), where allowable levels are many orders of magnitude below what has been demonstrated in the lab to have “no effect.” At each point in the process, EPA assumes a “worst case” scenario and purposefully errs on the side of caution. This includes assuming maximum exposure to the most sensitive parts of the population (infants and pregnant women) and multiplying “uncertainty factors” together for any issue on which the science can’t give a definitive answer.

 

When the 3 parts per billion limit was set in the early 1990s, this created an “uncertainty” buffer, or margin, which was 1,000 times below the no-effect level. What the EPA said in its recently published review is that toxicological science has advanced considerably in the past 30 years, and that means many of the “uncertainties” the EPA built in back in 1991 are no longer uncertain and could, theoretically, be dispensed with. The EPA doesn’t say this, but if one were to calculate safety limits according to the up-to-date science, the allowable limit could easily be set above 500 parts per billion and still achieve a wide margin of safety.

 

But EPA isn’t going to do that. It’s keeping the 3 parts per billion. It works for farmers and the agency doesn’t see any compelling need to change it.

 

One could complain, perhaps, that if they were basing their regulations on the best science, they really ought to raise it; but it makes no sense to complain that EPA has done an incredibly thorough job and is accurately reporting out on their findings.

 

The problem is that environmental groups such as the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Environmental Working Group (EWG) have, as usual, mischaracterized the EPA’s findings and in their news releases and seemingly conflated EPA’s drinking water limits with its ecological review, which has nothing to do with human health.

 

The eco-review does, in fact, recommend raising these eco limits in light of extensive new studies, but these limits are based on the effect of atrazine on algae, which sits at the bottom of the food chain for lots of aquatic wildlife. Algae, like most other plants, engage in photosynthesis to turn sunlight into energy. Atrazine works by disrupting photosynthesis in plants. Humans don’t do photosynthesis. The eco-limits don’t apply to drinking water and they will have no effect whatsoever on any human health issues.

 

If you read all this and still think the safety factors aren’t enough, think about the difference between drinking one cup of coffee, which is harmless and may possibly have positive health effects, and drinking 1,000 cups of coffee in one sitting, which would probably kill you.

 

If you’re worried about NRDC’s claims that atrazine is an “endocrine disruptor,” understand that this is only true in the sense that any food that contains naturally occurring phytoestrogens is an endocrine disruptor, including (and this is a short list) rice, beans, wheat germ, apples, carrots, coffee, tea, and—sorry to break it to you—beer. Most of these foods are thought to have positive health effects. Phytoestrogens like resveratrol and genistein—two famous “antioxidants”—are even marketed as health supplements, and there is evidence that they fight inflammation and may be protective against cancer.

 

If you still say that pesticides are yucky and you don’t want artificial chemicals in your diet, I’m sorry to tell you that you’re out of luck. All farmers who grow to scale, including organic farmers, use chemical pesticides, and they have for centuries. NRDC and EWG won’t tell you this, but organic farmers use older pesticides like sulfur, neem oil, and copper sulfate, which is highly toxic to people, plants and wildlife and is a known carcinogen. And because these “natural” chemicals are less targeted and less effective, they dump them on their fields in truly astounding quantities.

 

A final word about “big agriculture.” My first response is, “if only it still existed.” I carry no brief for ethanol mandates (which are stupid) and farm subsidies, but the political power of the “farm lobby” has become increasingly attenuated as, ironically, farming has become ever more efficient and fewer and fewer people have any direct connection to the land. If you doubt this, pick up a copy of the Des Moines Register sometime, which has effectively become an environmentalist, anti-farmer mouthpiece.

 

Meanwhile, the power of the environmentalist movement grows ever greater by the day. Many of the “nonprofit” anti-pesticide and anti-GMO groups are the same, and funded by many of the same money sources, as those that are pushing the global warming agenda, including the Rockefeller Family Fund, the Bloomberg Family Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the McArthur Foundation, as well as the organic industry and the trial bar.

 

Environmental “nonprofits” that are in part or wholly devoted to a “Green New Deal”-style attack on modern agriculture have a war chest in the neighborhood of $10 billion a year, which goes into producing nothing but environmentalist propaganda that barely disguises its true anti-capitalist, big-government agenda.

 

I’d take everything they say with a heavy helping of salt—which according to NRDC standards, is also an endocrine disruptor.

Cory Booker Belongs in Jail Over Newark’s Water Crisis

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 1 Comments Sunday, September 15, 2019 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Don’t drink the water in Newark.

The only thing worse than the crime and corruption in the New Jersey city that gave the nation Cory Booker is its drinking water. First, they found lead in the water in schools and then in people’s homes.

In some homes the lead content in the water is four times higher than the federal limit.

And Cory Booker, the Senator from New Jersey, running to run the country, is blaming racism.

"Newark's water emergency demands our federal government's immediate attention. Everyone
deserves clean, safe water - it's shameful that our national crisis of lead-contaminated water disproportionately hits poor black and brown communities like my own," Booker tweeted.

Did a “national crisis” cause Newark’s clean water crisis?

Booker probably forgot that he had served as the ex-officio chairman of the Newark Watershed Conservation and Development Corporation. It's understandable that Spartacus forgot all about it because while he was running Newark, he never actually attended a single NWCDC meeting.

And, after a while, he stopped even pretending to send a representative.

The NWCDC was being paid $10 million a year to manage Newark’s water.

Linda Watkins-Brashear, a Booker ally and donor, worked as the director of the NWCDC. At least until she was arrested, tried and convicted in a $1 million kickback scheme. The scandal broke during Booker’s final year in office. And the NWCDC, Board of Trustees, which he was supposed to be overseeing, took swift action by dissolving the board, and writing a $450,000 check to Brashear.

It was Brashear’s second severance package. The first one, of $200,000, came when she left for three weeks while still continuing to receive her salary. That was the same year Booker took office.

Nice work if you can get it.

By the end, Booker hadn’t even bothered sending representatives to NWCDC board meetings, which were being illegally decided by three people, while handing his political ally years of no-bid contracts.

Brashear had donated thousands of dollars to Booker and volunteered on his campaign. And she used the organization that was supposed to oversee Newark’s clean water to write $200,000 in checks to herself, lose $558,000 in high risk margin trading, give her ex-husband a $332,000 no-bid interior design contract, loan $20,000 to the National Black United Fund, and cover a lobster and cognac dinner.

And now, mysteriously and inexplicably, there’s a “national crisis” of lead in Newark’s water.

You can have clean water for the people or cognac for Democrat fixers, but not both.

It truly is shameful that this “national crisis” of Cory Booker’s corrupt political allies stealing money meant to ensure clean water “disproportionately hits poor black and brown communities”.

President Cory Booker will make sure that the “national crisis” will affect people of all races when his crooked Democrat associates are running the country the way that they ran Newark.

Booker is black. As is Brashear.

As is Donald Bernard Sr., the senior projects manager of NWCDC, who was sentenced to 8 years in prison after pleading guilty to accepting $1 million in bribes from contractors.

Clearly, this is a national crisis of environmental racism.

How did the NWCDC get away with this for so long?

Its general counsel, Elnardo Webster II, was Booker's former law partner, friend and advisor. Elnardo was working for Trenk, DiPasquale, Della Fera & Sodono, which was also Booker’s former law firm. While the firm was making a fortune from city contracts, including for NWCDC, it was paying Booker $700,000.

A judge levied major fines against Booker’s former law firm over its NWCDC work.

Yes, this “national crisis” of Cory Booker’s sleaziness must be urgently addressed as he now holds an office in the national government and would like an even bigger national office.

“Newark's water emergency demands our federal government's immediate attention,” insists Booker, who never attended a single meeting of the organization that was supposed to be overseeing it.

And which he was supposed to be overseeing.

According to Booker, who spent most of his time in office alternating between Twitter and Oprah, he just couldn’t find the time. Clean water never got his attention, immediate or otherwise.

Back in May, Cory Booker had introduced the Water Infrastructure Funding Transfer Bill to help Newark move money around. "Communities across the country don't have clean drinking water, and those communities are disproportionately low-income and communities of color,” he claimed.

“This is an environmental justice issue.”

It’s not an environmental justice issue. It’s a criminal justice issue.

A normal person who chaired a board of trustees that committed flagrant illegalities, overseeing an organization where millions of dollars were stolen by one of his donors, and received hundreds of thousands of dollars from a disgraced law firm connected to the scandal, all of which put the public at risk, would not be appearing running for President. He would be in prison.

The environment didn’t cause this. It’s not a national crisis that somehow “hit” Newark. It’s not racial discrimination against “communities of color”.

Cory Booker keeps trying to blame racism for the actions of his corrupt political associates. And the Democrats keep acting as if their corruption is some sort of national problem to be blamed on us all.

Edward McRae, an NWCDC employee, set up a landscaping company to get NWCDC contracts, even though he had no experience in landscaping.

He didn't even buy landscaping equipment until he got the landscaping contract.

How did Eddie get so lucky?

McRae said that he met Brashear while working on an unstated political campaign and heard that it was raining contracts. It’s unknown whose campaign it was, but it was certainly a Democrat campaign.

While Booker’s pals were robbing the NWCDC blind, they knew better than to actually drink the water.

The OSC investigation found that public funds weren't just being used to buy lobster, filet magnon and cognac, but $534 for imported drinking water from Florida.

Booker is right. It is shameful.

It’s shameful that the former party of segregation fastened on to black communities like a leech while blaming its corruption on racism and an imaginary national crisis. It’s shameful that the media promoted Booker’s routine as a progressive social media guru while failing to hold him accountable.

And it’s shameful that Booker and his political allies have no shame.

Instead of apologizing, Cory Booker is trying to shift the blame for his action and inaction to all Americans. He’s trying to blame racism, instead of blaming his thieving donors and allies.

When the NWCDC was stealing money meant for clean water, Booker pretended he knew nothing. Now he knows that bottled water is being handed out in Newark because of a national crisis of racist water.

Before Brashear was sentenced to 8 years in prison for stealing almost $2 million, her lawyer claimed that, “there is no crime here”.

Hundreds of cities, and thousands of agencies and organizations across the country have been robbed by Democrat politicians, donors and activists, the same way that Booker’s pals robbed Newark.

But there’s never a crime. It’s always a “national crisis” that gets blamed on social problems and racism.

When the schools don’t work (the $100 million that Mark Zuckerberg plugged into Newark’s schools on Booker’s behalf might as well have been set on fire), and the power is out, and there’s no clean water, when residents aren’t evacuated ahead of a hurricane and the buildings are falling apart, it’s racism.

It’s never the fault of the Democrats who are responsible for the schools, the buildings and the water.

If only we cared enough, the media tells us, children wouldn’t be drinking water with lead. If only we paid higher taxes and sacrificed more, Booker’s associates would have been able to drink twice as much cognac and gorge on twice as much lobster, king crab and filet mignon.

And now, despite years of EPA warnings, Booker is demanding that the federal government get involved. He’s right again. The federal government ought to get involved. And it ought to involve handcuffs.

Cory Booker doesn’t belong in the White House. He belongs in prison.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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