The Virginian-Pilot, Norfolk, Va., Daryl Lease column

Mar 8, 2010 — The Virginian-Pilot

Daryl Lease

Mar. 3, 2010 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) -- Beware the federal rain puddle inspectors.

They're headed your way if President Barack Obama and his socialist pals get their way -- or so some foes of an updated Clean Water Act would have us believe.

It's a disconcerting claim. I've always considered the environmental law a shining example of why we keep government around.

Congress passed several forerunners to the act, but the most comprehensive version dates to 1972, a few years after Ohio's Lake Cuyahoga caught fire and illuminated our nation's problem with water pollution.

Since then, the law has helped improve the safety of our drinking water and revive wildlife habitats, among other things.

In the past decade or so, though, a general disdain for all things regulatory -- combined with a controversial pair of Supreme Court rulings -- has taken some of the splash out of its effectiveness.

The court's majority said the feds were overreaching in interpreting the law's definition of "navigable waters" to include streams and other sources feeding into rivers.

The phrase probably is less precise than it should be, although the legislative intent -- let's protect each and every body of water connected to places where we gather fluids or food -- was refreshingly clear.

Unfortunately, the rulings have stifled the work of the Environmental Protection Agency. Regulators recently told The New York Times that about 1,500 major pollution probes have been halted in the past four years because of the court rulings.

Worse, the regulators said they may be unable to go after as many as half of the nation's biggest polluters now.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and other lawmakers drafted a bill to clarify what should be protected.

The Clean Water Restoration Act would apply to "waters of the United States." It covers the same basic guidelines that were in play before the court's rulings.

Critics say the wording is too vague; that's a worthy debate. Some industry groups, though, are clearly fighting for less regulation, not more clarity. "The game plan is to emphasize the scary possibilities," a member of the Waters Advocacy Coalition, a group of industries, told The Times.

What's scary? Opponents say the feds are out to seize oversight of rainwater, ditches and more.

The EPA, of course, has expressed no interest in becoming the puddle police or to go cleaning the leaves out of our gutters.

Among the bill's foes is Glenn Beck, the FOX News host who's adept at turning water into whine. To hear him tell it, the measure is part of Obama's grand scheme to seize "everything but your birdbath."

Beck attributes the legislation to "regulatory czar" Cass Sunstein, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Beck contends Sunstein's views are "radical" and "dangerous."

Never mind that similar bills appeared several years before Sunstein took office and garnered bipartisan support. And never mind that the supposedly sinister "czar" job that Sunstein holds was created in 1980.

In Beck's bombast, this bill has nothing to do with protecting our drinking water. It's about grabbing people's land and expanding federal power, pure and simple.

"This country is changing," he said. "It is transforming, a transformation a lot of Americans -- mark my words -- when they fully wake up and see the awful state that we are in, they will say, 'Not in my lifetime.' They don't think we need it. They don't want it."

Beck's tirade was just one of many streams of Obama-is-out-to-destroy-us conspiracy theories that poison the well of nearly every policy debate these days.

But here's the poison we should be worried about: Following the Supreme Court rulings, an appellate court overturned a fine imposed against a company convicted of dumping oil, lead, zinc and other chemicals into a creek in Alabama.

That's just one example. According to the EPA, about 117 million Americans get their drinking water from sources fed by waterways that appear unprotected under the new interpretation of the Clean Water Act.

I'm far more concerned about that than I am about puddle inspectors, secret-agent presidents and paranoids on parade.

Daryl Lease is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va. E-mail him at daryl.lease@pilotonline.com.

Newstex ID: KRTB-0212-42674892