Political Quotes

“I wish to congratulate our friend and colleague, the Senator from Iowa, on this strong vote on the motion to proceed to this congressional resolution of disapproval of this overreaching regulation issued by the Environmental Protection Agency. I want to talk a little bit about this rule, but I also want to talk about how symptomatic this is of the overreach we are seeing coming from the executive branch, particularly when it involves rulemaking. This rule is a response to a Supreme Court decision and a number of other decisions by the lower courts which held previously that the Federal Government had overreached when it comes to trying to regulate so-called navigable waters of the United States. I think there is no real question in anybody's mind that under the interstate commerce provisions of the U.S. Constitution, the Federal Government has a responsibility when it comes to navigable waters, but, as the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said in a decision it handed down on October 9, the plaintiffs in the case against the Environmental Protection Agency and this particular rule established a substantial possibility of success on the merits of their claims where they said that the rule's treatment of tributaries, adjacent waters, and waters having a significant nexus to navigable waters is at odds with the Supreme Court's decision in the Rapanos case, which was handed down in 2006.…”