Federal Water Quality Protection Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. MARKEY. Mr. President, Boston's sports teams have had their share of great moments. After a win, you can hear the crowd celebrating by singing a song by the Standells that goes like this:

Yeah, down by the river,
Down by the banks of the river Charles.
Well I love that dirty water,
Oh, Boston, you're my home.

While dirty water signals a win for a Boston team when that is sung, the real victory has been beating the pollution in the Charles River and Boston Harbor since the passage of the Clean Water Act. That victory is thanks to the implementation of that law, which protects sources of our drinking water from pollution and restores dirty waters back to health.

We need to keep the Clean Water Act's winning streak alive. Unfortunately, the bill the Senate may consider today could end the record of wins for the Clean Water Act. Its history of success has made the Clean Water Act one of the greatest American success stories. Before the Clean Water Act, there was no Federal authority to limit dumping, set national water quality standards, or enforce pollution rules. City and household waste flowed untreated into rivers and harmful chemicals were poured into wetlands and streams from factories and powerplants. Back then, we were all on the honor system. Water supplies were managed by a patchwork of State laws and an appeal to the common good. The result: mass pollution on a historic scale, oozing rivers so toxic that they could ignite into flames, fish dead by the thousands. America's riversides became a theater of public hazards and chemical death.

In short, before the Clean Water Act and the Federal involvement that was necessary, America's waterways were its sewers. Then, in 1969, a public firestorm was touched off by a Time magazine photo of the Cuyahoga River on fire in Ohio. With full-throated support from the public, Congress mobilized and produced the Clean Water Act, one of the most important pieces of environmental law in the history of the United States. The ultimate goal of the Clean Water Act--making waterways safe for the public and wildlife--was so popular that in 1972 a bipartisan Congress overrode a veto by Richard Nixon.

The successes and the benefits yielded by the pursuit of the goal of clean waterways would prove tremendous in the years ahead.

The Clean Water Act guards the Nation's natural sources of drinking water by guiding how we use them. It protects the wetlands, the streams, and other surface waters that ultimately provide us with drinking water.

The Clean Water Act has slowed the loss of wetlands, known as the ``kidneys of the landscape'' because of their ability to remove pollution from the water. They do this for free, making wetlands the most fiscally responsible water system in the world. The only alternative to this free service is to put our waters on dialysis by constructing filtration plants for billions of dollars in long-term maintenance and building costs. Our wetlands support the $6.6 trillion coastal economy of the United States, which comprises about half of the Nation's entire gross domestic production and includes our nearly $7 billion annual fishery industry and $2.3 billion recreational industry.

The Clean Water Act has doubled the number of swimmable and fishable rivers in the United States. It has saved billions of tons of fertile soil from being washed off of our farms. It has fostered State and Federal collaboration, giving States a key role in managing poisonous runoffs from cities and farms. It established a permitting system to control what gets dumped into America's waterways. It developed fair and objective technology-based pollution control standards to help industries plan their compliance investments in advance. It sets science-based water quality standards and requires well-thought-out plans to meet them. Its environmental monitoring requirements prevent rehabilitated waterways from backsliding into unusable condition. It provides $2 billion annually in critical funding to States for water quality and infrastructure improvements. Among its most important contributions, it empowers citizens to enforce its provisions and actively guard the health of their families.

For all of its benefits and successes, however, the Clean Water Act has still not reached it goal. One-third of our rivers still have too much pollution. When these drain into coastal waters, they add to the problems being caused by ocean acidification and warming. The pollution can cause dead zones off of our coasts and in the Great Lakes, putting drinking water supplies at risk and threatening sea life. While the act has slowed their loss, wetlands continue to disappear, and gone with them are millions of wetland-dependent creatures, such as ducks and turtles and most of the species of fish we find on our plates.

Clearly, clean water must be preserved for the health of the public, the environment, and the economy. That is why the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps have spent so much time developing the recently finalized clean water rule. The clean water rule clears up confusion caused by two U.S. Supreme Court rulings on the reach of Federal water pollution laws and restores protections that were eliminated for thousands of wetlands by President George W. Bush in his administration.

Specifically, the rule revises the definition of ``waters of the United States,'' a term that identifies which waters and wetlands are protected under the Clean Water Act. The rule was written in response to requests for increased predictability and consistency of Clean Water Act permitting programs made by stakeholders such as the National Association of Home Builders and the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association.

The clean water rule restores clear protections to 60 percent of the Nation's streams and millions of acres of wetlands that were stripped away under the previous Republican administration. The EPA estimates that returning the clean water protections will provide roughly half a billion dollars in annual public benefits, including reducing flooding damage, filtering pollution, supporting over 6 million jobs in the over half-a-trillion-dollar outdoor recreation industry.

The rule protects public health by closing pollution loopholes that threaten drinking water supplies to one-third of Americans. In Massachusetts, the drinking water of nearly 3 in 4 people will now be protected.

The rule enjoys broad support from local governments, small businesses, scientists, and the general public, who submitted over 800,000 favorable public comments. Eighty percent of Americans support the clean water rule, and when asked if Congress should allow it to go forward, they responded with a resounding yes.

Despite public support for clean water and this commonsense rule, the Republicans want to bring a bill to the floor that would undermine the national goals and policy written by the Clean Water Act. If enacted, this water-polluting bill would undermine the legal framework that protects our water. It would once again leave one-third of the Nation's drinking water vulnerable to dangerous contamination. It would set up a fight over technical details that would prevent us from protecting the public health by preventing the dumping of toxic chemicals into natural public drinking water sources.

The critics falsely claim that the clean water rule overreaches because it enables broader Federal jurisdiction than is consistent with law and science.

So, ladies and gentlemen, I support the work the EPA and the Army Corps have done in putting together the clean water rule. It will continue the string of victories our Nation has enjoyed under the Clean Water Act. I urge my colleagues to oppose any legislative efforts to overturn the clean water rule. We need to keep the Clean Water Act working for all of America.

I want to make sure that the only place in Massachusetts people are talking about dirty water is after one of our great Boston sports teams have chalked up another victory. That is the only time we should be singing about dirty water because otherwise the health and well-being not just of people in Massachusetts but all across our country will be harmed.

I yield the floor.

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