EPA Chief Scott Pruitt Will Bring Sanity to the EPA, Relief to Landowners and Farmers

Posted by Tina

It’s one thing to be concerned for the environment, it’s quite another for government to become so fanatical that it places unwarranted punishing burdens on citizens. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what radical activist environmentalists did at the Obama EPA. As the Obama administration abused the Bush NSA regulations to spy on Americans, it expanded (abused) the 2007 Supreme Court decision that defined the parameters of wetlands regulation. University of Virginia Law Professor Jason Scott Johnston explained the egregious overstepping of power, “The broad trend of environmental regulation during the Obama administration was to use the coercive threat or reality of regulation simply to try to shut down entire industries and entire types of economic activity,” says Johnston. “They have promulgated a definition of wetlands which clearly contradicts what the Supreme Court said.” His remarks were quoted in a story today in Reason featuring a Tehama County farmer with 450 acres, John Duarte, who has nearly been bankrupted by Obama era EPA water pollution regulations:

In 2012, the Army Corps of Engineers, working in conjunction with the EPA, accused Duarte of damaging wetland features on his property. He was hit with $30 million in fines and restoration fees.

Duarte’s troubles stemmed from a 2015 provision in the Clean Water Act known as the Waters of the United States rule that was meant to better protect large bodies of water by regulating use of the streams, ponds, and ditches that flow into them. The EPA has used this provision to micromanage private land use.

The agency accused Duarte of mismanaging the wetland areas located on his property, claiming that his four-inch plow furrows created small mountain ranges. They contend Duarte should have obtained a permit before tilling his own land.

“The average time to obtain a Clean Water Act permit is close to two years, and the average cost just to hire the consultants and do the studies to get permits approaches a quarter of a million dollars,” says Anthony François, a lawyer with the Pacific Legal Foundation who represented Duarte in his case against the government. “Clearly if you had to undertake that kind of cost and time just to get the necessary permit to plow your fields every year you’re not going to grow a lot of food.” … Duarte settled his case in August for $1.1 million to avoid paying a significantly larger fine. He hopes Pruitt’s focus on regulatory rollback will restore farmers’ property rights.

“We become peasants where these federal prosecutors can come in like the Sheriff of Nottingham, decide for themselves what they think a family can pay,” Duarte says. “If the federal prosecutors can come on this land with this set of facts, there is no farm in America that is safe from this kind of prosecution.”

And that’s the problem with the radicals that run the Democrat Party. They don’t respect individual rights. They use the courts to make law on the one hand and defy it on the other. They believe our Constitution is too limiting for those in power. They want to fundamentally transform America from a government of and by the people to a more oppressive government run by elites of the socialist Democrat Party. Under Obama our government ran roughshod on private citizens. Anyone who dared to object was immediately labeled racist. Individuals like Mr. Duarte were fighting the fight of their lives against a regime that did not value or recognize his property, speech, or legal rights. see video here.

The Trump administration has vowed to re-establish Constitutional rights and reform government toward more common sense approaches and efficiency. The EPA is a good place to start making that happen. Scott Pruitt has clearly already begun. The Trump administration is following through on campaign promises despite the dysfunction in Congress.

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