Every Drop of Water in America

By Alan Caruba

For sixty years I lived on a little street called Brookside Road. The name came from a real brook, a Depression-era project lined with smooth rocks that was serene and beautiful, bounded by trees on both sides.

Some in the federal government want to exert control over that brook and over every drop of water in America. It is an attack on private property and it is emblematic of the real agenda of environmentalists. It is Communism.

The American Land Rights Association recently issued a notice. “Having been slapped down by the U.S. Supreme Court’s two recent decisions that the words ‘navigable waters’ in the Clean Water Act limited federal agencies to regulation of navigable waters only, Democrats and liberal Republicans in Congress are striking back.”

I wrote a recent commentary on the Environmental Protection Agency’s attempt to circumvent the wording of the Clean Air Act in order to regulate carbon dioxide, the gas upon which all vegetation relies in the same way humans and other creatures require oxygen. Now the EPA in conjunction with the Corps of Engineers wants to control all waters nationwide.

It is a naked grab for power that the Founding Fathers feared. John Adams wrote that “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”

Private property is so essential to freedom that the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution specifically says “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” There would be no just compensation if the EPA acquires the power to decide how Americans can use water and where.

Just as we have already seen examples of how U.S. agriculture is being sabotaged by the Endangered Species Act, denying water to farms in Oregon and California, there are countless other examples of how these “environmental” laws are used to keep new plants to generate electrical energy from being built and the thwarting of all manner of other development.

Environmentalism used to mean conservation, but now it is just Communism, first, last and always.

The proposed language to change the Clean Water Act would replace “navigable waters”, i.e., rivers, lakes, and bays, on which a ship, barge or boat could travel, with the all-encompassing phrase “waters of the United States.”

Here's their definition:

“The term ‘waters of the United States’ means all waters subject to ebb and flow of the tides, the territorial seas, and all interstate and intrastate waters and their tributaries, including lakes, rivers, streams (including intermittent streams), mudflats, sandflats, wetlands, sloughs, prairie potholes, wet meadows, playa lakes [a flat dried up area, especially. a desert basis] natural ponds and all impoundment of the foregoing, to the fullest extent that these waters are subject to the legislative power of Congress under the Constitution.”

Deserts? Sandflats? Wet meadows? Praire potholes?

But the Constitution expressly forbids the taking of private property and that includes countless lakes, ponds, desert and forested holdings. If the EPA is empowered to tell property owners what they can and cannot do with their own property as the result of a puddle, a pool or ordinary rain runoff that is, for all intents and purposes, a “taking” by the U.S. government.

In my home State of New Jersey, a vast area in the northwestern region was designated a water reserve and the people who owned homes and other properties there lost the value of those properties along with the right to undertake any change or addition to them. It was a clear “taking” by the State, but was upheld by its liberal courts.

Now liberals in Congress want to literally “take” every square mile and inch of America by ceding to the EPA and the Corps of Engineers powers forbidden by the Constitution and feared by the nation’s founders.

Just how important is water to life? America has spent billions to search for it on the Moon and Mars!

Here again, Americans must call upon their Representatives and Senators in Congress to determine if they support this vile legislation or to find out what steps they will take to stop it. The proposed bill in the House has no number as of this writing, but the one in the Senate is S-787.

Americans, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike are locked into a battle with Congress and the White House to protect the Constitution and to protest policies that are totalitarian in nature and a threat to our most fundamental beliefs.

Nearly a million made their voices heard on September 12 in Washington, D.C. and continue to organize Tea Parties.

There are forces at work in our nation’s capital that are seeking to destroy the nation through the devaluation of the dollar, the takeover of major industries and other aspects of our economy, and the imposition on huge taxes in the midst of a crippling Recession.

Fight them! Fight them! Fight them!

A New Threat: Federal Control of All U.S. Water

By Alan Caruba

It is little wonder that Americans increasingly distrust their government.

Contrary to the fundamental conservative principle that the federal government is limited by the U.S. Constitution and should, as a matter of course, not intrude on those rights allocated to the States, the federal government has become a monster demanding to control every square inch of our land mass, all its energy reserves, and now all its water!

I track a lot of this egregious acquisition of power to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970. Its initial mandate was to ensure that our air and water was protected against pollution and to take remedial steps to clean both to the extent they were not a threat to health. Additionally, the EPA was given control over toxic substances. From that point on, the EPA has grown faster than any other government agency.

That said, the Interior Department is even older and done a great job of expanding control of the landmass, a huge percentage of which is owned outright by the federal and state governments.

Grant, however, that as far as the nation’s air and water is concerned, the EPA initially did a good job, though some of its methods border on the insane. For example, requiring many different blends of gasoline for different areas just drives up the cost per gallon. The government demand for the inclusion of ethanol in gasoline drove down its mileage while at the same time actually driving up the amount of C02 from tailpipe emissions.

Being a government entity, however, the EPA is never satisfied to tend to its original and ongoing mandates. It must expand its powers because that’s the natural inclination of all forms of government.

A case in point is Senate bill 787 which is widely regarded as the biggest federal power grab in the nation’s history. Deceptively titled (aren’t they all these days?) the “Clean Water Restoration Act”, it has more than twenty sponsors. Its chief author in the House is Minnesota Congressman James Oberstar (D) and, in the Senate, it is co-sponsored by Russ Feingold (D).

If passed into law, it would control every drop of water everywhere in the nation. It gives the federal government control over entire watersheds and just about everything is a watershed, all water, all land, all people, all communities and cities.

What the bill does is remove the limiting term “navigable” from the 1972 Federal Water Pollution Control Act and replaces it with “waters of the U.S.” That would include wetlands, intermittent streams, lakes, prairie potholes after a rain storm, mudflats, ponds, meadows, and sloughs.

Over at the Heartland Institute, a free market think tank, this pernicious piece of legislation has not gone unnoticed (see links below). While the Institute does not take positions on legislation, its staff are free to express themselves on their merits. James Taylor, editor of Environment & Climate News, points out that “State and local governments rightfully retain jurisdiction over lesser bodies of water that have no legitimate federal interest.”

Taylor warns that, “There is no limit to the reach of federal power under the new bill. The last thing American citizens need is EPA bureaucrats asserting jurisdiction over seasonal puddles in people’s backyards, looking to file criminal charges every time somebody shores up a mucky depression to improve his land.”

The folks of the National Water & Conservation Alliance have a website (see link below) that will provide a lot more information, plus a “Petition in Support of Grassroots Alternatives” I urge you to sign it.

Why is this important? Well, the Greens have been wreaking havoc upon the nation’s farmers, usually in the name of some unknown species of fish no one has ever heard of and whose absence would not be missed.

They did this a few years ago to the farmers of the Klamath Valley in Oregon and they are at it again with a stretch of California whose farming depends on a specific water source. Shutting off water to both caused enormous losses of crops, the revenue those crops had represented for decades, and all the jobs associated with their planting, harvesting, processing and distribution.

If passed S. 787 would become a full-employment act for environmental activists and attorneys, something that goes on every day in America, generating endless litigation because every acre of land and water would be in dispute. It would stall further any development of any kind. It’s one more attack on the sacred concept of private property, the lynchpin of our entire economy.

This is tyranny masquerading as “environmental protection.” It must be stopped. Sign the petition at http://www.nationalwaterconservation.org/ and then email, fax, write or call your Senator to express your opposition.

For more information, click on these links:

http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/23059/Expert_Comment_Clean_Water_Restoration_Act_Gives_Federal_Government_Too_Much_Power.html

http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/24912/Montana_Senate_to_Feds_Leave_Our_Water_Alone.html

http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/23058/New_Polls_Majority_of_Americans_Oppose_Expansion_of_Clean_Water_Act.html

http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/21805/House_Bill_Aims_to_Circumvent_Supreme_Court_on_Clean_Water_Act.html