Source: United States Senator for West Virginia Shelley Moore Capito
To view Senator Capito’s remarks, click here or on the image above.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Vice Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference and Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, delivered remarks at the weekly Senate Republican Leadership press conference on the Biden administration’s flawed and burdensome “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) rule, as well as the need for permitting reform.
In February 2023, Senator Capito led her colleagues in introducing a formal challenge to the Biden administration’s WOTUS rule through a Congressional Review Act (CRA) joint resolution of disapproval. The resolution comes after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced a new rule in December 2022 repealing the Navigable Waters Protection Rule (NWPR), and changing the definition of Waters of the United States in a way that will expand federal regulatory authority.
HIGHLIGHTS:
HYPER-REGULATORY WOTUS RULE: “This is the rule that talks about ‘navigable waters.’ It can be a farm pond, it can be an intermittent stream, or it could be the Ohio River. They don’t sound the same, do they? I don’t think you can navigate a farm pond too well, but this administration is reaching into all of this to overreach with their new regulation of the Waters of the U.S.
BIDEN’S WOTUS REGULATIONS WILL HURT AMERICANS: “[WOTUS is] going to be costly, it’s going to be disruptive, and it’s going to put an onus of federal regulation where it has never been before: onto a lot of our private landowners. So I’m expecting that this will pass the United States Senate with bipartisan support. It’s already passed the House. It will go to the President’s desk and we’re going to challenge the President, again to say, ‘Mr. President, are you going to listen to the heartland of America where your overreach and your regulatory environment on the waters is going to penalize so many people?’”
PERMITTING REFORM: “I’m really proud of what the House is doing. Within that bill is permitting. I believe that we as a body, Republicans and Democrats in the House or the Senate, along with the president, can get permitting reform if we work into our committees, which we’re going to do. John [Barrasso] over on energy and I’m over on EPW, working this through our committees because here’s the deal: we passed the CHIPS bill, we passed the infrastructure bill. These are all great things, but if you can’t permit it, any of it, you can’t build it. You can’t mine for a critical mineral right now to put in a chip because you can’t permit a mine. So timelines, judicial review, and other parts of the permitting process are incredibly broken. We agree on this.”
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