Federal Water Quality Protection Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE: Mr. President, the famous Republican Senator from Rhode Island John Chafee, who was one of the authors of the Clean Water Act, would be sorry to see what has become of his party today and what is being done to the Clean Water Act that so many Republicans worked so hard on for over so many years. The pretense is that some evil bureaucratic force at the EPA has leapt out to take over American farmers and ranchers. That is not what has happened.

The Supreme Court made decisions about what the Clean Water Act says, defining the navigable waters of the United States, and the EPA had to follow the Supreme Court's guidance, which they did. I believe they have been faithful to that Supreme Court guidance. They went through more than 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific publications. They did 400 public meetings. They had over 1 million comments on the proposed rule. Guess what. The vast majority of those comments were in support of the rule.

What we have here is not some DC bureaucratic evil presence against ranchers and farmers across the country. What we have here is a fight between upstream and downstream.

As Senator Barrasso very plainly said a moment ago, the big players in this are the big special interests in agriculture, the big pork producers with their ginormous manure lagoons, and the big commercial AG conglomerates. If you want to be with them fine, but let's not pretend this is about protecting little ranchers and farmers.

This is about upstream versus downstream. I come from Rhode Island. I am from a downstream State. I have to say that if I were in big agriculture and I saw this rule, instead of coming in here and whining and complaining and yanking people's chains in order to get changes made, I would grab this rule and run like a bank robber because this bill does so much for upstream agriculture at the expense of downstream fishermen, downstream aquaculture, and the downstream health of our rivers and bays. All agricultural exemptions and exclusions from Clean Water Act requirements that have existed for nearly 40 years have been retained. We have learned a little bit since then about what goes on.

One place I recently went to was Ohio. I spent the weekend in Ohio doing one of my climate tours of the difficult States of the Union. In Ohio, I went to Port Clinton on Lake Erie. I was taken by the folks from Stone Laboratory and from some of the leading charter captains in this area off to the Bass Islands just offshore. They told me about the algal bloom that took place in the Toledo area. Technically, this was not an algal bloom. Technically, it was cyanotic bacteria; it was a bacterial bloom. It was so thick that the fishing captains described how their boats slowed down in the muck. It was like running a powerboat through pudding.

Toledo had to stop providing freshwater to its citizens and spent millions of dollars having to import freshwater and provide bottled water. Lake Erie is 2 percent of the water of all the Great Lakes with 50 percent of the fish. Two percent of the water and 50 percent of the fish in the Great Lakes are in Lake Erie. It has a robust fishing economy for walleyes and perch. The folks who go out and make this their livelihood don't think it is very funny because this whole watershed feeds down into Lake Erie.

Because of climate change, phosphorous has driven rain bursts. The rains have powered up in this area. So the phosphorous is washing off the farmers' fields and is coming down, and that is what is creating the cyanotic bacterial bloom in Lake Erie.

This upstream stuff makes a big difference to people who are downstream. Wyoming doesn't have a lot of downstream. Wyoming is a landlocked State, so I appreciate why the Senator is so enthusiastic about this. But for those of us who are downstream, this is a rule that, frankly, is too weak. The fact that we have to stand here and fight it from getting even weaker--from putting our rivers and our bays at even more risk--is very unfortunate. It is not just phosphorous. Phosphorous is what happens to drive the bacteria growth in Lake Erie. It is insecticides, it is nitrogen, and they are doing immense damage in our waterways.

I will conclude where I began. If you are Big Agriculture and this is your special interest bill, you ought to run for it. Don't waste your time on this. Grab this existing Clean Water Act bill, and go for it like a bank robber with his money because you got away with being able to continue to do immense damage to downstream resources without any regulation at all. To now be here complaining--it is really amazing to those of us who are representing downstream States, downstream interests, downstream fisheries, downstream bays, and all the catchment areas such as Lake Erie that get clobbered as a result of pollutants that flow into our waters.

I yield the floor.

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