President Obama, in his veto letter, said the rule is a product of extensive public involvement and years of work, calling it “critical to our efforts to protect the nation’s waters and keep them clean”. As Harvest Public Media’s Luke Runyon reports many farm groups oppose the regulatory change.
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“The clean water rule is carefully created to protect our lakes, rivers and drinking water and ensure that EPA requirements are applied fairly and consistently across the nation”, Nolan said. “With Congress clearly showing their disapproval of this rule, the consequences of WOTUS implementation now rest exclusively with President Obama”. But there’s still plenty of judicial wrangling. “Even the Army Corps said WOTUS is unworkable, and that the entire economic analysis used by EPA to support the rule had no basis on economics or science”, Kelleher adds.
The Senate will vote Thursday on a long-shot effort to override President Obama’s veto that preserved his contentious water pollution rule.
Minnesota’s congressional delegation mostly broke along party lines on the issue, with Rep. Collin Peterson the only Democrat joining Republicans to vote against the rule.
President Obama vetoed Senate Joint Resolution 22, disapproval of the EPA’s Waters of the United States rule January 20.
“The administration has tried to spin WOTUS as some ‘clean-water measure, ‘ but a bipartisan majority of Congress understands it’s really a federal power grab clumsily masquerading as one”, said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) yesterday.
“The responsibility for managing Colorado’s water should be left to state and local governments along with our water districts, not with the federal government through overreaching regulations like WOTUS”, Gardner said in a statement soon after casting his vote.
President Obama issued the ninth veto of his presidency Tuesday, rejecting a congressional resolution that would have overturned federal regulations on clean water.
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The administration has countered that the rule’s reach is much more limited, targeting bodies of waters, including streams and wetlands, that impact larger water sources. “Moreover, he has taken side against the 32 states and countless stakeholders who have challenged the WOTUS rule”.
