Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Thursday, January 19, 2017
Obama's ‘Forceful' Final WOTUS Defense
The Obama administration is fighting for a controversial water regulation until the very end of its tenure in power.
The Justice Department filed “a 245-page brief in defense of the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule that defines every water body in the nation, and determines whether they can be regulated under the Clean Water Act,” The Washington Post reported. The brief filed last week is “the administration’s most forceful defense of the rule,” the Post reported. Justice Department Assistant Attorney General John Cruden “said that by filing the brief, the court now has to consider it, and the lawyers prosecuting the case for the current administration will still be around to do so. To undo a rule, Cruden said, the Trump administration would have to take the same arduous path that the EPA and Army Corps took to create it.”
Legal challenges to the rule “should be denied because the rule is not arbitrary, capricious, or otherwise contrary to law,” the brief argues...more
At this time, and the time is right, the only way to rein in the judicial and regulatory agencies is by an amendment to the Clean Water Act defining and restricting the geographic scope of it.
ReplyDeleteProperty Rights recognized as paramount and shall not be infringed.
Amendment versions are already drafted, ready to be introduced.
Congress and the Senate can pass it. Trump would sign it.
This will put the courts/judicial branch and regulatory agencies (EPA-ACE) in their respective places.