This legislation (Senate Joint Resolution 22) would provide for congressional disapproval of the “waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule submitted by the Corps of Engineers and the EPA. According to Representative Steve Southerland (R-Fla.), sponsor of a similar bill in the House in September 2014, under this proposed WOTUS rule, “Federal agencies like the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers would see their regulatory authority under the Clean Water Act drastically expanded, to the point of covering almost any body of water throughout America, from ditches to culverts to pipes to watersheds to farmland ponds.”
The Senate passed S. J. Res. 22 on November 4, 2015 by a vote of 53 to 44 (Roll Call 297). We have assigned pluses to the yeas because both federal water regulations and the EPA are unconstitutional, and if the rule were to be allowed to go into effect, activities such as farming and real estate development would be greatly hampered, since farmers and developers would be subject to increased unconstitutional permit requirements and fines concerning their treatment of almost any “body of water,” no matter how small.
