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House passes bill to stop WOTUS

The U.S. House has passed a bill to block the EPA’s Waters of the U.S. proposal from going into effect. The vote, though, is short of a two-thirds majority needed to override a predicted presidential veto.

Democrats say the Republican bill comes too soon because the EPA and Army Corps of Engineers haven’t released their final version of the rules yet.

American Farm Bureau President Bob Stallman says the vote sends a strong bipartisan message. He says, the way the EPA and Corps “drew up the WOTUS rule, it was more about regulating land than it ever was about protecting valuable water resources.”

In a statement from the Natural Resources Defense Council, water program attorney Jon Devine says the bill is “the tip of the spear in an all-out assault by developers, big agriculture and the fossil fuel industry” against “efforts to protect the public from dangerous pollution in their drinking water supplies.”

A bill is pending in the U.S. Senate that would force the EPA to scrap the current rule and start over.

And Senate Ag Committee leadership has said there’s one sure way to stop WOTUS.  Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, a member of the Senate Ag Committee recently told farm broadcasters, “We’ll continue to push back against that. One way that we can effectively push back against the EPA and Waters of the U.S. is through the budgeting process.”