Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee reacted with indignation to a new interpretation of anti-pollution statutes revealed Wednesday by the Obama administration.
Led by its science-illiterate committee chair Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), conservative members of the panel sounded off, declaring the Environmental Protection Agency measures to be the latest example of President Obama abusing executive branch authorities.
“The EPA has set themselves up to increase federal control over private lands, and I will not allow it,” Inhofe said, in a statement released after the rules were announced. The press release singled out the ability of the EPA, under the final rule, to “regulate isolated wetlands and ponds in farmer’s fields by designating them ‘regional treasures.”
The assessment of Inhofe, however, was always bound to be looked at askance by a range of observers. The committee chair is a known practitioner of pseudo-science as the author of a WorldNetDaily-published book called The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future. Recently, on Feb. 26, he acted out his opinions on climate science on the floor of the Senate by throwing a snowball. President Obama called the stunt “disturbing.”
Inhofe has been chair of the Senate environment committee since January. A staunch long-time ally of the fossil fuel industry, he had previously served in the role from 2003 until 2007, when Republicans had last held the balance of power in the Senate before this year.
The Obama administration had already sought to both downplay the rules’ potential impact and address some of Inhofe’s points when it rolled out the initiative. EPA chair Gina McCarthy said Wednesday that the new rule “does not interfere with private property rights or address land use.”
“We’re finalizing a clean water rule to protect the streams and the wetlands that one in three Americans rely on for drinking water,” she commented. “And we’re doing that without creating any new permitting requirements and maintaining all previous exemptions and exclusions.”
The administration has argued, according to The Hill, that regulators require the rule to be clear about what, exactly should be covered by the Clean Water Act—namely, lesser bodies not explicitly covered by the landmark law, which impact larger bodies of water that are. Administration officials also said, according to the paper, that the regulation is needed after Supreme Court decisions in recent years “called into question Clean Water Act protections for some small tributaries, streams and wetlands that were previously covered.”
“It does not regulate any ditches unless they function as tributaries. It does not apply to groundwater or shallow subsurface water, copper tile drains or change policy on irrigation or water transfer,” McCarthy added.
Brian Deese, a White House environmental adviser described the rule as “an important win for public health and for our economy” and said that opponents to it are exclusively “polluters who want to threaten our clean water.”
Joining Inhofe in delivering a Wednesday broadside to the EPA and the White House were two of his committee members. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) took to Twitter to share a meme declaring, to the EPA, that “ponds and potholes are not ‘navigable water.’” Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.), meanwhile, published an anti-EPA meme of her own with the slogan “It’s Your Water.” She added she would “work tirelessly” to block the new rule, which she described as “an attack on the people of Nebraska.”
