Abusing Clean Water Act

The Pacific Legal Foundation's focus has always been on protecting property rights and limiting government overreach. Their Principal Attorney Reed Hopper talks about the EPA's abuse of the Clean Water Act. "Their gone beyond the statutory language of the Clean Water Act and even invaded the limits set by the Constitution. When this gets up to the Supreme Court, it's going to get an unwelcome reception. We think the justices are fed up with this overly broad interpretation of the Clean Water Act. You say navigable waters but there have actually been farmers who have come under scrutiny by the Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA just for irrigation ditches. Well it gets worse than that. We are litigating a case now where normal plowing is considered a violation of the act because the little ridges that are made by the rake constituting a discharge conversion of a wetland into an upland which is a violation of the act. The Clean Water Act was passed in 1972 and it expressly says that the federal government can regulate discharges into navigable waters and at the time the Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA interpreted that in its normal way meaning a channel of water in which one could float a boat and could be used for interstate commerce. But immediately, they started pushing the envelope and now today, they are claiming that the term navigable waters covers non-navigable waters. That is so absurd it's hard to even comprehend."