Congress Wants Your Water and Your Land
S.787: Clean Water Restoration Act is Nothing but a Land Grab
The bill is packaged as another shining example of the feds doing the right thing by working to preserve our precious national waterways. In reality it's just another Washington power-play, this time in the form of an all out land grab. Fox News reported on this story December 14th, claiming the U.S. government now owns or controls nearly 40% of all the land in the country. Doesn't that sound strange in a nation where private property rights have been codified in the Constitution? It does to me. Then again I'm just a right-wing, conservative nut-case!
Regardless of your politics this bill ought to scare you right along with health care reform, cap-and-trade, auto bailouts, and Wall Street takeovers. It is a dangerous bill that seeks to remove language from Section 502 of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (33 U.S.C. 1362) to redefine what are legally considered U.S. Waters; waterways the federal government can regulate to fight pollution. Right now the code restricts government control to "navigable waterways", but if the Senate bill passes and is merged with the House version, the federal government will have control over every drop of water in the country. The bill states as follows:
"SEC. 4. DEFINITION OF WATERS OF THE UNITED STATES.
Section 502 of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act (33 U.S.C. 1362) is amended--
(1) by striking paragraph (7);
(2) by redesignating paragraphs (8) through (25) as paragraphs (7) through (24), respectively; and
(3) by adding at the end the following:
'(25) WATERS OF THE UNITED STATES- The term 'waters of the United States' means all waters subject to the ebb and flow of the tide, 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, natural ponds, and all impoundments of the foregoing, to the fullest extent that these waters, or activities affecting these waters, are subject to the legislative power of Congress under the Constitution.'."
Pay special attention to sub-paragraph (1) which strikes paragraph (7) from the current code. That paragraph states:
"The term "navigable waters" means the waters of the United States, including the territorial seas."
The paragraph denotes that wherever the Federal Water Pollution Control Act uses the term "navigable waters" it is referring to the waters of the United States. In other words, navigable waters in the current law are only those waters contained within the current U.S. boundaries; not international waters or waters under the jurisdiction of another country. This delineation however, does not remove the definition of the word "navigable". The federal government is still restricted to having control only over waterways that can be navigated by human beings using a watercraft.
S.787 goes even further, just to make sure nothing is left undone. It says:
"SEC. 5. CONFORMING AMENDMENTS.
The Federal Water Pollution Control Act (33 U.S.C. 1251 et seq.) is amended--
(1) by striking 'navigable waters of the United States' each place it appears and inserting 'waters of the United States';
(2) in section 304(l)(1) by striking 'NAVIGABLE WATERS' in the heading and inserting 'WATERS OF THE UNITED STATES'; and
(3) by striking 'navigable waters' each place it appears and inserting 'waters of the United States'."
In other words, the bill will strike the term "navigable waters" anywhere it occurs in the current code, replacing it with "waters of the United States". This is monumental because if you remove the word "navigable" you give the feds control over every pond, creek, waterhole, well, irrigation system, and puddle in the country. Furthermore, with control of the water comes control of the land that surrounds it. John Barrasso (R-WY) puts it this way:
"The government wants control of all water -- that also means that they want control over all of our land including the private property rights of people from the Rocky Mountain west, the western caucus and the entire United States."
Private property rights are a foundational principle for a free society in that the ability to own property is also the ability to live your life as you so chose within the confines of said property. The founding fathers understood this principle, having ancestors who came to this land after leaving a system where the monarch owned everything. In that scenario the subjects were nothing more than feudal servants to the crown, every aspect of their life dictated to them by the one who owned their land, houses, businesses, etc., etc. It was a system that failed then and is still a failure everyplace it still exists in the world.
The stooges in Congress can claim all they want their desire to protect our nation's waters from pollution, but I for one don't believe a word of it. Though I'm not in favor of government regulation, pollution prevention can be accomplished without the need for the government to take control of all the nation's water. We currently have national speeding control in the form of highway speed limits; do the feds have to take ownership of our cars to keep us from speeding further? Where does this Marxist mentality end?
Like nearly everything else the federal government has done since the days of FDR, this legislation is but a thinly veiled attempt to take possession of more land, more water, more business, more farms, and so on. It is an attempt to bring more and more of our lives under government control.
It must be stopped.
Now.
Stay tuned and keep reading my political opinion articles. Sometime in the next few weeks I'm going to offer you a concrete and hands-on way for to get involved and help restore liberty and freedom to our nation. I hope you will take advantage of the opportunity and encourage others to do the same.
Sources:
FOXNews.com - Not So Private Property?: Clean Water Restoration Act Raises Fears of Land Grab - http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/12/14/private-property-clean-water-restoration-act/
Read The Bill: S. 787 - GovTrack.us - http://www.govtrack.us/congress/billtext.xpd?bill=s111-787
US CODE: Title 33,1362. Definitions - http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode33/usc_sec_33_00001362----000-.html
Published by Matthew Gerwitz
Born 1965 in upstate NY; married for 21 years with three kids ages 20, 19, and 15. Matt is a pastor, writer, homeschooling dad, and musician; and very, very busy. View profile
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- The government,s control over U.S. waters is restricted to those which are navigable.
- S.787 is designed to strip current code of the term "navigable waters".
- Without the term "navigable waters" the government can control all water in the U.S.
13 Comments
Post a CommentI suport this as well. Just as free speech does not give you the right to yell "Fire" in an crowded theater where none exists, and controls must be put on food and medicines to prevent toxins from entering our food supply, shouldn't we take action to protect our water supply from being so polluted that it is unusable? I live in New York state where about half the lakes and a large part of the rivers are polluted. By the current definition of "navigable waters" given to us by the US supreme cout, a large part of our waterways are. I unregulated by the EPA. would people stand for the amounts of toxins and pollution put in water not only through industrial waste as well as agricultural waste to be put into our food supply be unregulated?
I meant to say corporation, sorry.
Will this prevent the natural gas extraction process of fracking? I bet not, even though it is ruining vast amounts of underground drinking water. The cooperations will always prevail, we live in a cooperate run government.
The last bit of my message got cut off. Here is the rest of it.
If you don't see how bills like these will be used to exploit you and remove freedoms, you are the uninformed.
The government should not be allowed to do much outside of:
1. Managing the land (maintaining borders and protecting from invasion)
2. Managing basic communication (postal system, national wire communications)
3. Maintaining roadways for travel (ensuring roads are passable)
States are to manage all else, even monetary policy from the state level.
-Gama Xul
We need to kill this bill. We don't need or want federal interference with how a state manages its resources. The federal government couldn't get clean water to displaced people during a declared "national crisis" in Louisiana after a hurricane. That's a fact.
Consider for a moment that the U.S. government is run by human beings (and it is); they don't care about you. The majority of the individuals don't live in your state and they don't care about its well being. This is why external authoritative management fails. The managers are too removed from the issues and exercise massive authority with little intelligence. It's called the "Absentee Landlord Effect". They don't really care about your quality of life, they just want the money and will screw you on the security deposit every chance they get. It is within human capacity, especially for politicians, to exploit the uninformed. If you don't see how bills like these will be used to exploit you and remove freedoms, you are
Chris, S.787 does more than simply close a loop hole and allow suit on behalf of the U.S. By your own admission we already face restraints on land use, this bill would further increase those restraints. As I said in an earlier comment, it is already illegal to pollute; civil lawsuits can already be brought against polluters. What this bill does is bring the un-navigable waters under the REGULATORY CONTROL of the Feds. We all know that REGULATORY CONTROL by federal agencies goes well beyond simply prosecution of law-breakers, it ends up in the agencies creating their own "law" and using it to regulate liberty. Therefore, S.787 amounts to a land grab because it gives the federal gov't. REGULATORY CONTROL over private land. When the feds can dictate how you use your land it is no longer your land for all practical purposes.
It means if you have a puddle in your yard, they control it. SORRY BUDDY but we're not buying it. Time for a revolution! I'm not paying for RAINWATER. Greg sounds like you should go to CUBA where no one has to right to anything. I want the FEDS to butt out of my life, not take over everything I own!
They think we tea partiers are angry now? JUST WAIT TIL THEY TRY TO PULL THIS CRAP ON US. Some person is not coming to tax my runoff. I'll run him off with something else instead. :-)
Matthew, I would say that the accused are still presumed innocent. The power of the federal government as defined in the Federal Water Pollution Control Act is to "bring suit on behalf of the United States in the appropriate district court to immediately restrain any person causing or contributing to the alleged pollution".
S.787 alters jurisdiction of the federal government to include bodies of water that are non-navigable. We already experience restraints on the manner that we use land as defined by federal, state and municipal governments. How do you define S.787 as a land grab? It merely closes the loop hole that prevents enforcement of pollution control on non-navigable bodies of water.
Chris - Our legal system is based upon the presumption of innocence until proven guilty; not on the presumption that people need to be protected from themselves. It is already illegal to pollute, so...swift and severe punishment levied against all polluters will deter further pollution. Like just about everything else our government does, this bill punishes otherwise law abiding citizens for the crimes of a few. This kind of thinking never works because it never ends; we do not live in a perfect world.