Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2018

Floor Speech

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Mr. Chairman, this amendment seeks to preserve our current Clean Water Act protections for our rivers, streams, and wetlands. Our Nation's river systems and wetlands provide values that no other ecosystem can. These include: natural water quality improvement, flood protection, shoreline erosion control, recreation, general aesthetic appreciation, and natural products for our use at no cost.

Yet section 430 of this bill seeks to undermine the critical balance between protecting these waters and the day-to-day operations of our Nation's farmers, ranchers, and foresters. Under current law, farmers, ranchers, and foresters can carry out their normal operations in any waterbody without securing a Clean Water Act permit.

So what this means is farmers can continue to plow their fields, including potential wet areas that have been farmed for decades, plant their seeds, harvest their crops, without ever having to obtain approval under the Clean Water Act.

Any normal farming, ranching, and forestry exemption is going to include minor limitations. For example, a farmer cannot use the current exemption to convert his farmland to a residential development without obtaining a permit. And a rancher can't use the exemption to plow under a wetland to expand his reach of grazing lands. And forestry operations cannot use this exemption to change the course of a local stream to improve drainage on their growing lands.

In short, the way the Clean Water Act currently operates is to allow normal ranching, farming, forestry operations to continue without a permit, unless the activities either change or convert the use of the waterbody to a new purpose, or impair the historic flow or reach of a stream or wetland.

So if the planned activity triggers any of these limitations, the current law requires the activity to obtain a permit. That is perfectly reasonable. But section 430 of this bill would, in essence, provide an absolute clean water exemption for impacts to any streams or wetlands that happen to be on agriculture, ranching, or forestry lands, regardless if they have any relation to these activities.

Mr. Chairman, this is a fundamental change to the Clean Water Act, and one where the impacts have never been explored. When the EPA was asked what the impact of this amendment would be, here was their response:

This amendment would be a significant departure from almost 40 years of implementation of the Clean Water Act by eliminating the existing provision requiring that the exemptions apply only to normal, as in established or ongoing, farming practices.

This change could result in the loss or impairment of thousands of acres of valuable wetlands and other waters where land is converted to agriculture.

Mr. Chairman, we should not be using an appropriations bill to change Federal policy related to the protection of our Nation's rivers and streams. To the best of my knowledge, no hearings or investigations on the impacts of this provision have been held. If this Congress is interested in overturning almost 40 years of Clean Water Act precedent, regular order would require hearings before the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, which has sole jurisdiction over the Clean Water Act, and approval by that committee before consideration on the floor.

This rider is bad policy for the protection of our environment, for the protection of human health, and bad policy for the protection of our public safety. Mr. Chair, I urge support for my amendment, and I reserve the balance
of my time.

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Mr. Chairman, I thank the perspective of the chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on this. I think our clear understanding is that the exemptions, as currently written, allow for all normal farming, ranching, forestry activities, and that the permit would only be required when there is a substantial difference from the activity as it has gone on before, and that this is the way the law has been interpreted and enforced for the last 40 years.
Mr. Chair, I yield back the balance of my time.

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Mr. Chairman, my amendment would strike section 431. Section 431 does two things. First, it withdraws the Clean Water Rule. Second, and more importantly, it breaks procedure and creates a loophole so that the removal of the Clean Water Rule does not have to abide by the Administrative Procedure Act.

In essence, we are creating a loophole to eliminate a rule, a rule requested by the Supreme Court and one that took several years to put together. This elimination without allowing tweaks, thoughtful removal, or comment is a radical and dangerous precedent.

In fact, 80 Members of Congress and I actually asked for an extension of the 30-day comment period to eliminate the Clean Water Rule to allow the American people to have a say. The Trump administration agreed with us and extended the comment period an additional 30 days. I don't get to say that too often.

So clearly, there is a desire for a comment period, as evidenced by our letter and the administration's decision to appropriately extend the comment period, but the language in this bill would eliminate that process completely. I include in the Record the request for extension.

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So is this our new status quo, that once an industry decides it doesn't like how a regulation turns out, we eliminate that regulation without comment or consideration for the various stakeholders or its value.
We are eliminating the process here that we, Congress, put in place to ensure that those regulations were being considered, adjusted, or even removed, that they were done thoughtfully and while keeping stakeholders, like the American people, in mind.

It could be any rule, but the rule at stake this time is the Clean Water Rule. Over 100 Members of Congress joined me to reinforce the value of the Clean Water Rule, because without it, the streams that help supply public drinking water serving one in three Americans will be at risk.

Rolling back the Clean Water Rule cannot be made in haste and without stakeholder input. Clarity was needed in light of the Supreme Court rulings in 2001 and 2006 about uncertainty of the scope of the waters protected under the act.

The EPA and the Corps held a lengthy and inclusive public rulemaking process, 200 days of public comment, 400 meetings across the Nation, and the rule reflected over 1 million public comments on the proposal, the substantial majority of which supported the Clean Water Rule.

So we are overruling, essentially, 1 million comments and 400 meetings to do this without the appropriate administrative process. So if it is withdrawn, I simply ask that the process be comprehensive and deliberative, and the bill does not allow for that.

With this rule at stake, this time it is the Clean Water Rule, but it could be any rule going forward. Mr. Chair, I include in the Record a letter from Members of Congress to Administrator Scott Pruitt opposing the proposed rule to rescind the Clean Water Rule.

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Mr. Chair, moving forward with permits for seismic airgun surveys for subsidy oil and gas deposits puts our vibrant Atlantic coast at risk.

I am a Virginia businessman, and I look at what seismic testing does. Congressman Rutherford and I led a bipartisan letter to the administration signed by over 100 of our colleagues expressing our concerns about seismic airgun blasting.

Our coastal economy relies on healthy ocean ecosystems, which generate $95 billion in gross domestic product, support nearly 1.4 million jobs each year. We have heard from countless businessowners, as Congressman Sanford has said, elected officials, residents all along our coasts who recognize and reject the risks.

NASA, the Department of Defense, the Florida Defense Support Task Force have all expressed concern that offshore oil and gas development will threaten their ability to perform critical activities. The North, South, Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Councils, which are responsible for the management of fish stocks and habitats in Federal waters from Maine to Florida, also have significant concerns about the risks associated with offshore drilling and seismic airgun blasting.

So you have numerous fishing and tourism interests, including all the local chambers of commerce, tourism, restaurant associations, an alliance representing over 41,000 businesses, and 500,000 fishing families from Florida to Maine oppose offshore oil drilling activities as well.

Opening up the Atlantic to seismic testing and drilling jeopardizes our economy and these coastal economies in the most immediate terms. I strongly support the LoBiondo-Sanford amendment and urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to support this critical amendment.

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Mr. Chairman, to respond to both my friends from South Carolina, one of the dilemmas with the additional exploration is that, by law, the data obtained from the seismic surveys are proprietary.

They will belong to the many different companies that will be doing this, and they won't be available to the American public; they won't be available to local government officials; they won't even be available to Members of Congress.

So this inability to access information will leave coastal communities without the opportunity to provide these substantive cost- benefit analyses that Congressman Sanford referred to. Our constituents would take on significant risks without being involved in the future development decisions. So, for that reason, I encourage us to vote for the Sanford amendment.

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