During consideration of a minibus appropriations bill (H.R. 5895), Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced an amendment to repeal the EPA’s 2015 “Waters of the United States” rule, which allows federal bureaucrats to broadly interpret the meaning of “navigable waters” under the Clean Water Act. This rule, Lee opined on the Senate floor, “effectively dramatically expanded the jurisdiction of the Federal Government over land in the United States, in some instances saying that if a plot of land is wet some of the time, some of the year, during any particular year, you can be subject to massive fines totaling millions of dollars if you do anything on that land, subject to the arbitrary determinations of Federal bureaucrats.”
The Senate tabled (killed) Lee’s amendment on June 21, 2018 by a vote of 62 to 34 (Roll Call 138). We have assigned pluses to the nays because both federal water regulations and the EPA are unconstitutional, and if the rule were allowed to stand, 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.
