TRUMP'S EXECUTIVE ORDER EARNS 4 PINOCCHIO'S
…This illegal dam was built by a
Wyoming rancher on a Green River tributary
Virtually all of Trump’s
statements against WOTUS rule failed with the Fact Checkers
Well, once
again the Post’s Fact Checkers have
awarded a whopping 4 Pinocchio’s to one of President Trump’s latest bogus Executive Orders.
This was
Trumps comment at the time of the signing.
“EPA’s so-called Waters of the United States rule (WOTUS) is one of the worst
examples of federal regulation and it has truly run amok and is one of the
rules most strongly opposed by farmers, ranchers and agricultural workers all
across our land. It’s prohibiting them from being allowed to do what they’re
supposed to be doing. It’s been a disaster. The Clean Waters Act says that the
EPA can regulate navigable waters, meaning waters that truly affect interstate
commerce. But a few years ago, the EPA decided that navigable waters can mean
nearly every puddle or every ditch on a farmer’s land or anyplace else that
they decide. Right? It was a massive power grab. The EPA’s regulators were
putting people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands and regulations and
permits started treating our wonderful small farmers and small businesses as if
they were a major industrial polluter. They treated them horribly. Horribly.”
Trump then
signed an executive order instructing a review of a regulation issued during
the Obama administration, called the “Waters
of the United States” rule. Supporters had hailed the regulation as a
necessary move to protect public health, and opponents criticized the federal
government for overreach by adopting the rule.
During his
remarks signing the executive order, Trump made a handful of claims that turned
out to be totally false, including that the rule has cost “hundreds of thousands of jobs”.
That claim and others were reviewed by the Fact Checkers .
And here are
the Facts
Decades of
debate over the regulation of wetlands and small streams preceded this
regulation. Here’s a helpful recap from the Washington
Post checkers:
“The push to unravel the rule marks yet
another shift in a decades-long debate over to what extent the federal
government can dictate activities affecting the wetlands, rivers and streams
that feed into major water bodies. The controversy has spurred two separate
Supreme Court decisions, as well as a more recent federal appellate court
ruling, as the two previous administrations sought to resolve the matter
through executive actions.”
Two Supreme
Court decisions that came down during the George W. Bush administration, in
2001 and 2006, that fostered uncertainty over exactly what falls under the federal
jurisdiction under the Clean Water Act.
In the 2006 Rapanos v. United States decision, for example, the court’s four
most conservative justices at the time offered a very constrained view that
only “navigable waters” met this
test. But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who refused to join either the
conservatives or the liberals, suggested in an opinion that the government
could intervene when there was a “significant
nexus” between large water bodies and smaller, as well as intermittent,
ones.”
The Obama
administration’s Environmental Protection
Agency and the US Army Corps of
Engineers then issued the 2015 rule to clarify the scope of federal
jurisdiction. But the rules opponents said it vastly expanded federal jurisdictions
over the waters, and believed it to be an overreach.
Legal
challenges ensued in several states. The US
Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit issued a nationwide stay, halting the
rule from going into effect. The Rule has been in limbo since.
Yes, there
were published estimates of the economic impact of the rule long before it was
issued. But since the
rule didn’t go into effect, what the hell is Trump is referring to by saying
that “EPA’s regulators were putting
people out of jobs by the hundreds of thousands.”
And for that
matter, if it’s not in effect, why is Trump saying the rule is “prohibiting farmers, ranchers and other agricultural workers from being allowed to do what they’re supposed to
be doing.”
The US Chamber of Commerce and the American Farm Bureau Foundation, two of
the biggest critics of the rule, did NOT
conduct a review of jobs lost since the court issued a stay. The media has
checked with several industry groups that had opposed the rule or asked the EPA to withdraw the rule, but they have
also received no estimated numbers for jobs lost.
“There is solid evidence that the federal
permitting programs in question, over many years, have greatly increased costs
and delays for major projects. That has negatively impacted the ability
of companies, many of which are small businesses, to create jobs. The
Obama WOTUS rule would have only worsened an already bad situation. This
Administration is committed to improving it and making it work so we can create
jobs and grow the economy, while also protecting the environment.”
This is a false Trump administration statement.
Trump also
stupidly said under the rule, EPA can
regulate “nearly every puddle or every
ditch on a farmer’s land or anyplace that they decide.” This is also false.
If he would
have checked, Trump would have found he EPA’s
final rule published in the Federal Register “includes the following exclusion for puddles”:
“The proposed rule did not explicitly exclude
puddles because the agencies have never considered puddles to meet the minimum
standard for being a ‘water of the United States,’ and it is an inexact term. A
puddle is commonly considered a very small, shallow, and highly transitory pool
of water that forms on pavement or uplands during or immediately after a
rainstorm or similar precipitation event. However, numerous commenters asked
that the agencies expressly exclude them in a rule. The final rule does so.”
The rule does
regulate some ditches: “The rule
continues the current policy of regulating ditches that are constructed in
tributaries or are relocated tributaries or, in certain circumstances drain wetlands,
or that science clearly demonstrates are functioning as a tributary. These
jurisdictional waters affect the chemical, physical, and biological integrity
of downstream waters.”
Trump also
miss-spoke about a Wyoming rancher who supposedly was affected by the rule: “If you want to build a new home, for
example, you have to worry about getting hit with a huge fine if you fill in as
much as a puddle, just a puddle on your lot. I’ve seen it. In fact, when it was
first shown to me, I said, you’re kidding, aren’t you? But they weren’t
kidding. In one case in Wyoming, a rancher was fined $37,000 a day by the EPA
for digging a small watering hole for his cattle. His land.”
However,
this case of this rancher, Andy Johnson, is much more complex than Trump
makes out.
The people at
FactCheck.org looked into the case in detail, and found that the Army Corps and the EPA found that the rancher had actually constructed a large dam on a
waterway that was a tributary of the Green River, (see above picture) which the waterway is deemed by the EPA as the “navigable,
interstate water of the United States.”
Therefore, according to
Fact Check:
“Building the dam constituted a “discharge of
pollutants” into “waters of the United States,” according to the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers, and thus required a permit that Johnson
also did not have, or even seek. . . . EPA
officials say that Johnson received multiple warnings before any enforcement
actions or fines were taken.
The EPA rules
about allowing pollutants into waterways are based on a substantial body of
evidence showing that “water quality and
flow in tributaries and wetlands can affect the water found downstream.”
Trump has made
several false statements in his remarks. He claimed that the Waters of the United States rule
affected puddles and ditches; it affected some major ditches, and technically
has an exemption for puddles. But opponents of the rule say that since a “puddle” is not defined in the rule, the EPA can still regulate what some people
may consider puddles. This is false and as usual, Trump totally exaggerated the details of the case
involving the Wyoming rancher.
The focus of
this was whether the rule cost “hundreds
of thousands of jobs,” and there is no evidence to support that Trump
statement. After the rule was issued in 2015, the US Court of Appeals for the
6th Circuit issued a nationwide stay blocking it from taking effect. Key industry groups that opposed the rule did
not find research into the impact of the rule on jobs after it was halted in
2015. The rule has been in limbo since, so it is not credible that any jobs
have been lost.
Based on all
that, once more Trump’s White House
has earned 4, long-nosed PINOCCHIO'S.
Now that Trump is also falsely saying that Obama wiretapped Trump Towers, we all had better get used to this type of 4 Pinocchio statements throughout Trump's presidency.
Copyright G.Ater 2017
Comments
Post a Comment