Good articles?? Each is rather short on detail don't you think? An activist lawyer from the Hysterical Resources Defense Council claims there are almost forty riders threatening clean water, yet he can't give us any thing of substance to ponder. He mentions the issue of clarifying which waters are covered under the federal CWA. In fact, the CWA defined those waters in 1971 as : "Navigable Waters". The executive branch has interpreted that term (Navigable waters) rather broadly over the past 40 years so that nearly every stream and river and their adjacent wetlands are covered by the Act and therefore regulated by the EPA and Corps of Engineers. However, about 20 years ago, the EPA and Corps took it upon themselves to regulate man-made drainage ditches, roadside swales, stormwater basins and erosion gullies in farm fields as well. In 2006, the US Supreme Court ruled against the Corps/EPA in the Rapanos case, clarifying that the gummit could not simply call those "waters" navigable and thereby regulate them without first getting Congress to ammend the CWA. Naturally the bureaucrats didn't like that answer so a few months ago they proposed an executive rule change instead. So, in the end, Congress is inserting the riders to prevent the bureaucrats from regulating ditches and drains and stormwater basins in a manner which the Supreme Court ruled illegal. It's too bad the NRDC apparatchik didn't tell us that part. But of course there was no time for that because the sky was falling and the interviewer was not the least bit curious.
