Final WOTUS Rule = more overreach by the EPA
If forced to describe Pacific Legal Foundation as only one particular organization’s bête noire, I would find it tough to pick just one. The California Coastal Commission? The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service? Your average state regulatory agency? The pickings are vast, and Constitution-violating government entities numerous.
But if forced to pick, I would have to go with the United States Environmental Protection Agency. We’ve beaten back the out-of-control EPA in court—again and again—yet, just like Jason Vorhees, the EPA keeps rising from the dead and overreaching again. In turn, PLF again and again turns to the challenge of stopping an agency bent on overstepping its constitutional bounds.
Today, Forbes published a very nice op-ed by my colleagues Reed Hopper and Todd Gaziano about PLF’s opposition to the EPA’s most-recent overreach, in the form of the new waters of the United States rule. Hopper and Gaziano point out that “virtually nothing escapes the rapacious control of the federal government under the newly minted definition of ‘waters of the United States,’” and further that the EPA has used the new rule to “expand[] its jurisdiction to a degree that would make a normal bureaucrat blush.”
As the op-ed explains, nobody ever blushes at the EPA. They just take, take, take, and take some more, and wait for someone to stop them. Gaziano and Hopper make clear that PLF intends to do just that. Read the whole thing.
