EPA's Waters of the United States (WOTUS) proposals gives the EPA "authority" over that normally dry ditch, pot hole, creek, or tank.
At the direction of their handlers (socialist bankers who control the Fed and the government), the EPA and the president's EO (that isn't law) set in motion a crippling set of "rules" and "regulatory" proposals contradicting Congress's intent of the CWA (which
is law), that will expand the EPA's authority over all waters (including subsurface "connecting" waters), its use, the land it's used on, and any land it drains from or across.
Meaning if it rains on a piece of land, that land and water and/or its run-off will be under EPA authority.
Meaning if a dry ditch, pot hole, creek, or dirt tank on a rancher's or farmers land stands water a few days after a heavy rain or rise, the EPA's Waters of the United States (WOTUS) proposals gives the EPA "authority" over that normally dry ditch, pot hole, creek, or tank.
Meaning dry land drainages that aren't navigable, boatable, fishable, or swimmable,
and that defy jurisdictional need under the CWA, can now be "regulated".
Control the water, control the land
This is the largest, illegal, private property land grab in U.S. history. Not only does it give the EPA control of the water on private property, it also requires EPA/Corps of Engineer permits if the agricultural industry wants to cut brush, clear land, root plow, burn-off, repair (field) tiles, drill a water well, spread fertilizer, lay pipe, spray cattle and hundreds of other ordinary, necessary, and routine tasks tied to any agricultural operation; all to be permitted, fee'd (charged), and "enforced" by the same unelected, unaccountable, federally paid envirocrats who wrote the proposals; who have no concept why these tasks have to be performed; whose job will be to act as land and water "police"--like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) acts on behalf of the EPA for "endangered plants and animals"-- and issue permits or levy "fines" for "violators" who get caught spraying a pen of cattle without one.
Takers taxing makers.
This EPA scheme is a deliberate shakedown of property owners with forced fees and permits requiring unnecessary time and money.
Like the Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the EPA's model bait-and-switch "oops-you just-lost-control-of-your-land" conservation easements that were monikered as ". . .saving endangered plants and animals and preserving land for future generations", so to was WOTUS sold as "clean, healthy water for all."
Pigs fly, too.
WOTUS is about taking control of private property, driving the market value of that land down, and its owners out of business and off that land. "Cleaner water" is the public's straw man, the excuse. WOTUS rules are purposely vague to give the EPA wide swath with its ax. So much so that interpretations by the EPA's own employees are contradictory.
Lawsuits will follow but few can afford them. Family ranchers and farmers will be presumed guilty for unpermitted WOTUS "violations" decreed by a
federal agency (the EPA) using unconstitutional
federal administrative "law"(read: proposals), written and approved by
federal bureaucrats and forced unconstitutionally on private citizens (with a presidential EO); the same citizens who will be forced to defend themselves out-of-pocket in a
federal court against
federal (contract) lawyers before a
federal judge--all of whom are paid from the same
federal pot.
A centralized stacked federal deck.
FACTOID: Congress has the Constitutional mandate to pass America's laws. Legislation is passed by Congress and either signed into law or vetoed by the sitting president. Courts then decide whether or not that law is Constitutional or un-Constitutional if the law is challenged. The presidential EO authorizing the EPA to use a set of vague. illegal, unlawful proposals giving the agency authority over all waters and by fiat, land, in defiance of a 40-year old established law, written and legislated by Congress and signed into law by a sitting president, defies credulity when both Houses of Congress voted against WOTUS, and the Clean Water Act was challenged twice, upheld twice, and twice ruled Constitutional by the Supreme Court.
EPA bureaucrats and the president have neither the power, authority, nor Constitutional right to force these restrictive WOTUS proposals on Americans.
This land and water grab by the EPA is reminiscent of how Bolshevik communists who, after gaining control of the Russian revolution by forcing a numerical majority of their confederates into key positions in the Duma, and placing 'czars' in charge of agencies (with decreed powers like those just handed the EPA) took over and controlled the Russian population. That plus the fear of spontaneous Bolshevik-directed genocides in which an estimated 60 million mostly white Russia Christians were either murdered or imprisoned in the Soviet's Gulags as "enemies (read: terrorists) of the state."
Communists knew the importance of controlling the land and the individuals on it, and what private (right to own) property would do to their failed, centralized, attempt at governing. That's why fist-fights between hardline communists and right-to-own Russian property advocates broke out when this subject came up in Russia's Duma during the lead-up to, and following, the so-called fall of communism.
An excellent summary of this fight over the right to own private property in Russia is a 2001 article by Leon Aron,
"Land Privatization"
Ironically, what Russian right-to-own advocates were fighting for, Washington just gave to the EPA to regulate.
The first EPA attempt to take over America's land and water
The first time the EPA tried to grab control of America's waters, the Supreme Court ruled in a
5-4 decisionagainst them when they attempted to cite the Migratory Bird Rule as authority for stopping a consortium of Chicago municipalities from using an abandoned sand and gravel pit for a solid waste disposal site; invoking the Commerce Clause--the only power given Congress by the founders with which to overrule state law.
EPA lawyers argued that migratory birds were "interstate commerce" generating revenue " . . . of very nearly the first magnitude…that millions of people spent over a billion dollars annually on recreational pursuits relating to migratory birds, and that the ducks needed the water that had seeped into the gravel pits. . ."
This maneuver is called the Commerce Clause gambit that the EPA attempts to use when trying to override state sovereignty and law.
The Court didn't buy it, saying: "...we find nothing approaching a clear statement from Congress it intended the (
sicClean Water Act) to reach an abandoned sand and gravel pit...to claim federal jurisdiction over ponds and mud flats falling within the "Migratory Bird Rule"
would result in significant impingement of the state's traditional and primary power over land and water use."
The Second EPA Attempt to Take Over the Waters of America
Next they tried skirting the "navigational" water definition in
Rapanos v United States .
John A. Rapanos back-filled a portion of his 54 acres in Michigan prior to development. The nearest body of
navigable water was up to 20 miles away. The EPA informed Mr. Rapanos that his ". . . saturated fields were waters of the United States that could not be filled without a permit."
Again, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 the EPA
had no authority under the Clean Water Act to regulate:
- Truly isolated, non-navigable, intrastate water bodies,
- Any area merely because it has a hydrological connection with downstream navigable-in-fact waters,
- Remote drains and ditches with insubstantial flows, and
- That federal jurisdiction under the Scalia majority (5-4 plurality ) ruling in the case was that the Clean Water Act ends at ". . .those relatively permanent, standing, or continuously flowing bodies of water ... that are described in ordinary parlance as 'streams, oceans, rivers, lakes'" and their wetlands. . ."--waters covered under the Clean Water Act's definition of navigable waters.
Failing in Congress and in the Courts, the EPA and the president, seeing their proposals had no legality, turned to the EO.
Obama's EO granted the EPA this unlawful and unconstitutional power that's designed to further erode private property rights--an attempt right out of a rogue king's, war lord's, dictator's, despot's or Bolshevik's playbook.
Whatever we say, goes.
This is why the founders wrote our Constitution. It's not a "living document" as
The City and their controlled propaganda outlets (MSM) blare at the public; to be shredded every few years by gluttonous bankers bent on controlling earth's resources and people. It was written to keep government and its go-fers out of America's living rooms, back yards, and off our lands. The banker's end game is to nullify the Constitution using bureaucratic agencies like the EPA to seize private property and other rights with agency "rules and regulations"--all of which are illegal under the Constitution.
Absent the right to own property and rule of law, you're left with an "ism"--fascism, socialism, communism--and a central control system for everything, including land and water, that benefits only a handful of psychopathic financial criminals at the top.
How is it the EPA and the president can ignore constitutionally established Congressional and Supreme Court law?
Here's how and why it's illegal
Copyright © 2015 by W. R. McAfee. All Rights Reserved.
Good EPA "laws" (read: "rules", "regulations") are long extinct, but if you had to pick one it would be the 1972 Clean Water Act (CWA) passed by congress four years after the Cuyahoga River in Ohio caught fire (Images for cuyahoga river fire burning--it wasn't the first time) because of the pollution in it.
The Act authorized the clean-up of this kind of mess in America's navigable lakes, rivers, and streams, and prohibited further dumping of dangerous industrial chemicals, waste, and other byproducts into these bodies of waters. It also allowed states to manage the clean-up of their own waters under the Clean Water Act (CWA), and enabled federal and state officials to work together to get the job done, .
