Providing for Congressional Disapproval of A Rule Submitted By the Corps of Engineers and the Environmental Protection Agency

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCLINTOCK. Mr. Speaker, Congress gave the EPA jurisdiction over navigable bodies of water large enough to support ship traffic. This EPA rule takes control over virtually every body of water in the United States, including many agricultural and drainage ditches, ornamental lakes, and small creeks and streams on private property.

Now, in 2010, Mr. Oberstar introduced a bill to grant them this power, and the Pelosi Congress refused to pass it; so the EPA simply decided to seize that power anyway.

This not only threatens to upend 150 years of State water and property rights laws, it also presents us with a grave challenge to our Constitution. If it is allowed to stand, this rule means that Congress' exclusive legislative powers have now passed unrestricted to the executive, including the power to repeal existing laws that guarantee to States supremacy over their own waters and the power to amend laws to seize vast new executive authority in direct defiance of this Congress.

This rule must not stand. It cannot stand.

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