EPA submitted the first portion of its rewrite process of the Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule for federal interagency review. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the draft rule would withdraw the WOTUS rule, which is currently stayed by the courts.The second part of EPA's process to comply with an executive order issued Feb. 28 involves coming up with new regulations to replace the rule.The White House Office of Management and Budget received a proposed rule May 2 that seeks to reinstate the old policies, which are based on 1986 regulations and subsequent changes shaped by three seminal US Supreme Court rulings on what are considered “waters of the US” subject to federal Clean Water Act protections.EPA said “great uncertainty” exists as a result of the legal challenges to the 2015 rule, which remains stayed nationwide pending a court review. “Therefore, we are recodifying the rules as they existed before, in an effort to provide more clarity” to the regulated industry, which includes miners, farmers and home builders, EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said. With the WOTUS officially gone, courts would likely dismiss pending legal challenges to the regulation.
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Friday, May 5, 2017
Rep. Conaway Blasts Sens. Stabenow, Leahy over Cotton Aid
Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Pat Leahy, D-Vt., are being labeled ‘reckless’ for stopping aid to cotton producers by House Agriculture Chairman Mike Conaway, R-Texas. He said the top Democrats on the Senate Agriculture and Appropriations committees were “reckless” in requiring that the budget deal also include aid for dairy producers.Stabenow and Leahy proposed to pay for the dairy aid by reducing the cotton payments rather than coming up with budget offsets for their requested dairy program language. Pitting one commodity against another “is a terrible thing to do, unless you want it to fail, and that’s what happened,” Conaway told members of the National Association of Farm Broadcasting.Ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture panel, Collin Peterson, D-Minn., said he hoped Stabenow and Leahy “learned their lesson... This is not the way to do things, to come in at the last minute and demand things, just because you’ve got a lot of power. That has got to end,” Peterson said.As for Stabenow, she said it was not fair to provide aid to cotton producers but not dairy. And she said that both issues should be part of a broader debate over the next farm bill. But veteran farm bill watchers say she wanted to keep cotton at bay in order to use that as leverage to get what she wants via the upcoming farm bill debate.EPA Begins Process of WOTUS Repeal and Replace
EPA submitted the first portion of its rewrite process of the Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule for federal interagency review. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the draft rule would withdraw the WOTUS rule, which is currently stayed by the courts.The second part of EPA's process to comply with an executive order issued Feb. 28 involves coming up with new regulations to replace the rule.The White House Office of Management and Budget received a proposed rule May 2 that seeks to reinstate the old policies, which are based on 1986 regulations and subsequent changes shaped by three seminal US Supreme Court rulings on what are considered “waters of the US” subject to federal Clean Water Act protections.EPA said “great uncertainty” exists as a result of the legal challenges to the 2015 rule, which remains stayed nationwide pending a court review. “Therefore, we are recodifying the rules as they existed before, in an effort to provide more clarity” to the regulated industry, which includes miners, farmers and home builders, EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said. With the WOTUS officially gone, courts would likely dismiss pending legal challenges to the regulation.
EPA submitted the first portion of its rewrite process of the Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule for federal interagency review. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said the draft rule would withdraw the WOTUS rule, which is currently stayed by the courts.The second part of EPA's process to comply with an executive order issued Feb. 28 involves coming up with new regulations to replace the rule.The White House Office of Management and Budget received a proposed rule May 2 that seeks to reinstate the old policies, which are based on 1986 regulations and subsequent changes shaped by three seminal US Supreme Court rulings on what are considered “waters of the US” subject to federal Clean Water Act protections.EPA said “great uncertainty” exists as a result of the legal challenges to the 2015 rule, which remains stayed nationwide pending a court review. “Therefore, we are recodifying the rules as they existed before, in an effort to provide more clarity” to the regulated industry, which includes miners, farmers and home builders, EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said. With the WOTUS officially gone, courts would likely dismiss pending legal challenges to the regulation.