West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey told Newsmax on Friday a federal judge's ruling that blocks the Environmental Protection Agency's attempts to revise the definition of "waters of the United States" prevents a land grab by the Biden administration that would be a recipe for disaster for farmers and other businesses.
West Virginia was among 24 states that sued the EPA after it announced its revised definition for "waters of the United States" to include waterways that have a "significant nexus" to navigable U.S. waters.
"The words 'navigable waterway,' [you] used to think about that for boats, right?" Morrissey said on "American Agenda." "Now we're trying to make things that don't touch water for 100 years into a navigable waterway. It's crazy. It's overreach."
On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Daniel Hovland in Nevada granted the states' request for a preliminary injunction prohibiting enforcement of the revision, ruling the states would "expend unrecoverable resources complying with a rule unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny."
Morrisey said the revised definition "represents a huge land grab and power grab by the federal government to try to regulate in areas that they have no business regulating.
"Whether you're a farmer, whether you're a contractor, a realtor, you're an energy worker, a miner, you just care about economic activity. You're going to hate what the Biden administration did, and that's quite frankly why 24 states and many associations stepped up and we filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration rule."
Congress passed a resolution March 29 against the revised definition — with four Democrat senators, including West Virginia's Joe Manchin — voting in favor of it, but President Joe Biden vetoed it on April 5.
Morrisey said there has been debate about which waterways are subject to federal regulation.
"The implications are huge for America because if you have to go through the federal permitting pathway, it's a recipe for disaster," he said. "It could [take] 313 days on average [to get] a general permit, over 700 days for a specialized permit, and that may be appropriate when you're dealing with federal waterways under the law.
"However, what we have here are areas that are traditionally subject to local and state regulation, and the localities and states absolutely have the ability to regulate. We want clean air. We want clean water, and that's what we're fighting about, and the Biden administration decided to go way too far and regulate your ephemeral ditch, your backyard stream, areas that you wouldn't think of seeing water in a long, long time, and they were trying to exercise that power grab in a way that would have really hurt a lot of people across the country."
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