Thursday, on the eve of Earth Day, the Senate narrowly defeated a controversial amendment that would have stripped funding for clean water protections and ensured defeat of a $37.5 billion energy and water spending bill.
The vote, according to USA Today, was the first big test of Senate leaders’ effort to pass all 12 annual funding bills that detail how federal agencies must spend billions of taxpayer dollars in 2017. The amendment would have barred funding for the 2014 Waters of the United States Rule, an Obama administration effort to protect streams and wetlands, but it failed by a vote of 56-42. It required 60 votes to pass. President Obama had promised a veto.
One of the senators voting to – in his words, “halt federal regulation of mud puddles, nearly all other bodies of water,” was Tennessee’s own Lamar Alexander, who said in a statement that the rule imposes a “big, wet blanket of regulation on farmers in Tennessee and across the country.”
In fact, the rule isn’t aimed at ordinary small farmers, and it preserves all the permitting exemptions for farming practices that historically existed under the Clean Water Act – things like plowing, seeding, minor drainage, agricultural storm water discharges, maintenance of drainage ditches and farm or stock ponds and irrigation ditches. Instead, it is designed to help curb water pollution from factory farms, which can produce as much animal waste as large cities, according to experts.
Congress hasn’t passed all 12 spending bills by the Oct. 1 deadline since 1994, and each fall in the ensuing years we’ve seen some sort of annual funding crisis that left lawmakers racing to write a hodgepodge spending bill at the last minute in order to prevent a government shutdown.
To pass the bills, senators must fight “poison pill” amendments – like this one – that undermine bipartisan support.
Gee, thanks, Sen. Alexander for joining the obstructionists yet again, but wrapping yourself in the mantle of supporting small farmers.