THE WEST VIRGINIA RECORD: Our View: At last, someone’s regulating the regulators at the EPA
For eight long years of ideological warfare many states have argued that rainwater runoff, ditches, and puddles are not bodies of water, much less navigable ones, and that federal bureaucrats have no right trying to define them as such so as to establish their authority over every inch of private property in this country.
Three years ago, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey and AGs from other states persuaded the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati to issue a stay preventing the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from issuing their Waters of the United States rule with its absurdly broad, and ominous, interpretation of “navigable waters” and “bodies of water.”
Morrisey was on hand in the Oval Office last year when President Trump signed an executive order directing the EPA and the Corps to review the rule, prepare to rescind it, and suspend litigation regarding it.
