WASHINGTON – Sen. Chuck Grassley
(R-Iowa), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee and senior member of the
Agriculture Committee, joined Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and 45
additional senators on an
amicus brief in support of the petitioners in the pending U.S. Supreme Court case
Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency.
The decision in this case will clarify what waterways are considered “waters of
the United States (WOTUS),” which will determine the scope of the federal
government’s authority in regulating private citizens and businesses under the
Clean Water Act (CWA).
Specifically, the brief argues that the
Supreme Court should adopt a longstanding, limited-scope definition of WOTUS
proposed by Justice Antonin Scalia in a 2006 case.
“Like the members of Congress that
enacted the CWA, [we] support policies that protect the environment while also
ensuring that States retain their traditional role as the primary regulators of
land and water resources, and that farmers, manufacturers, small business
owners, and property owners like the Petitioners in this case can develop and
use their land free of over-burdensome, job-killing federal regulations. These
entities need certainty about the scope of ‘waters of the United States’ under
the Clean Water Act, and the Court’s
endorsement of the Scalia test would provide that long-needed certainty,” the members write.
“In the CWA, Congress selected language
that, from practically the Founding, was understood both to exercise limited
jurisdiction and to preserve the States’ traditional role as the principal
regulators of local waters and lands. But this intent has now been turned on
its head. Through the ‘significant nexus’ test, the EPA and Corps can instead
use any ecological connection between land and nearby water as a pretext for
intrusive central planning. This case presents an opportunity for the Court to finally
put the genie back in the bottle and endorse the functionally equivalent test
proposed by Justice Scalia. Only then will Congress’s dual purposes of
cooperative federalism and environmental protection in the CWA be fully
vindicated,” the brief continues.
Grassley has long been an outspoken
critic of the Obama-Biden WOTUS overreach, which has slapped burdensome
regulations on Iowa farmers and landowners. He helped introduce the
Navigable
Waters Protection Act of 2021 to codify a more workable definition put in place by the Trump
administration, and he recently
urged the Biden administration to halt pending WOTUS rulemaking until the
Supreme Court rules on the Sackett case.
Read the full text of the amicus brief by
clicking
HERE.
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