> I wonder how many of them would even care. This week the EPA dismantled the Clean Water Rule.
This week, the EPA rolled back an Obama-era executive order interpreting the Clean Water Act. Hard to see how rescinding a three year old executive order could “dismantle” a 47-year old statute.
The Obama-era interpretation was ridiculous on top of everything else. The Wikipedia article is actually pretty good:
> The Clean Water Act is the primary federal law regulating water pollution in the United States. The language of the Clean Water Act describes itself as pertaining to ‘Waters of the United States’. These the act defines as ‘navigable waterways’, which connects the act to constitutional authority to regulate interstate commerce. Two U.S. Supreme Court decisions, in 2001 and 2006, interpreted the law to include waters not presently navigable that were formerly navigable that might be readily dredged to be restored to navigation or be made available for navigation. The scope of these decisions cast into doubt lower court decisions interpreting the act’s authority to extend regulatory authority to streams, wetlands, and small bodies of water not navigable in the sense of the interstate commerce clause.
So the Clean Water Act says the EPA can regulate ”the waters of the United States,” which is defined consistent with “navigable waters,” contemporaneous with Congress’s Commerce Clause authority over navigable waterways. The Obama EO extended it to include even small bodies of waters like ponds, such that farmers would have to get EPA permits to make modifications on their own land that was nowhere near navigable waters.
Maybe we need a law that requires permitting of everything that could affect any body of water no matter how small, because it’s true that pollution can flow from such waters into navigable waters. Maybe there is a way to even make such a law constitutional (e.g. setting up state regulation of water bodies that fall outside the commerce clause). But the Clean Water Act is not that law, and the permitting framework under the CWA is not appropriate for farmers doing work on land far from rivers and lakes.
So just because farmers supported rolling back this rule, why would you assume they’d be okay with radioactive materials polluting their land? Is there any room in our politics to acknowledge that agencies sometimes overreach, and just because you want to push back on that overreach doesn’t mean you want get rid of the agency or long-standing laws entirely?