WASHINGTON — Just more than half of the members of the House of Representatives on Tuesday urged President Bush to drop regulatory changes that could reduce the number of streams and wetlands protected under the Clean Water Act.
They asked the president in a letter to abandon a rulemaking process launched in January and to rescind guidance sent to regulators telling them how to interpret a 2001 Supreme Court ruling. The letter was signed by 218 legislators, including 26 Republicans.
"The Clean Water Act is a landmark piece of legislation which shouldn't be diluted," said Rep. Jim Saxton (R-N.J.), one of the letter's authors. "Congress has few responsibilities greater than preserving clean water for future generations, and improving the quality of water damaged by many years of neglect."
The letter was one of the broadest congressional efforts to curb the string of actions the Bush administration has taken to ease environmental regulations. A similar letter was sent to the president by 26 senators, none of them Republicans.
"Excluding waters from the Clean Water Act will lead to unregulated discharges of pollution into streams, ponds and wetlands and, as this pollution flows downstream, greater pollution of our lakes, rivers and coastal waters," the letter from the House members declared.
Spokeswomen for the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency said the administration had not decided yet whether to rewrite the rule that defines which waters and wetlands are protected by the Clean Water Act. Officials continue to review the more than 130,000 comments responding to the administration's notice of proposed rulemaking. They stressed that whatever the decision, the president remained committed to the goal of no net loss of wetlands.
"We welcome the comments from the congressmen and will take them into account as we have not decided whether or not to proceed with a rulemaking," said James Connaughton, chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality.
This month, a senior government official provided the Los Angeles Times with a draft version of a new administration policy that would significantly narrow the scope of the Clean Water Act. Many wetlands, ephemeral streams not fed by ground water and intermittent streams that flow less than six months of the year would be stripped of federal pollution controls, potentially making them available to be filled in for development.
