On the recordJuly 7, 2015
I thank the gentleman for yielding. I rise in opposition to this amendment. The language is in there for a very good reason. Everybody assumes that the waters are not covered under the Clean Water Act, that being the navigable waters. That is a definition they came up with somehow--I don't know--but that they are unregulated waters. They are not unregulated waters. They are regulated by the States. When the court said, ``Navigable waters is kind of an elusive term, so maybe you ought to redefine it,'' the EPA said, ``Okay, we will just regulate all the waters,'' and that is what they did with this. They have gone way beyond whatever the intent of the Clean Water Act was. I will tell you most resource groups, most agricultural groups, everybody else disagrees with what the EPA has done on this new rule that they are writing. The fact that they have expanded their authority into areas far beyond what was intended in the Clean Water Act, I think, goes beyond the pale and goes beyond what Congress originally intended under the Clean Water Act. We are not talking about leaving waters unregulated; they are just being regulated by the States, and they need to start over in writing this rule.
