EDITORIAL - The United States of America was founded on the premise of natural rights with this underlying emphasis succinctly dictated as the unalienable rights of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

During the era in which the Declaration of Independence was framed the Pursuit of Happiness applied to property rights. Our founding fathers knew that Man has the right to attain property, keep property, and engage in the use of property to make his life better, all in manners that he saw fit as long as those same rights of others were not infringed. Despite the obviousness of such rights, the framers of our nation found it necessary to clearly define these rights in the Declaration and once again in the Fifth Amendment because history had showed to them that the inalienability of property rights had been cast aside by numerous societies and despots which in turn led to one of two things: intense oppression of their people or the collapse of such societies.

Over time, our government has strayed from these basal tenets. Property has become something that our government has gained illegally and expanded its power over, controlling it at whim regardless of landowner’s rights. Historically, we saw this manifested in our nation’s Indian giver ways when it gave land back to the Native Americans only to take it away with deadly force. In recent history we’ve witnessed our government abusing the “public use” portion of the Fifth Amendment by taking the power of eminent domain to unprecedented extremes, stealing land from families for the unjust benefit of corporations or the government itself.

Matters look to only get worse with subjugation of water rights by the federal government. There is an upcoming Congressional hearing about pending legislation known as the Clean Water Restoration Act of 2007. Bills HR2421 and S1870 are sponsored by Representative James Oberstar (D-MN) and Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), respectively, and have significant cosponsorship right down the party line. This act, were it to be passed, would amend the language of the Clean Water Act of 1972.

In its current form the Act gives jurisdiction over navigable waters only to the federal government. This is not a perfect law, but its does have considerable merit because navigable waters are necessary for the common good in trade and nourishment, and those upstream can very easily affect the life, liberty, and happiness of others downstream if they weren’t regulated in their industrial and waste outputs or kept from damming the waterway.

The new version would delete the word “navigable” and replace it with the word “all.” Therefore, no longer would federal jurisdiction apply only to lakes and rivers, but it would be extended to all bodies of water – permanent or intermittent – everywhere in the United States, be they in your backyard or on your farm. The federal definition will be extended to include, among other things, streams, wetlands, sloughs, wet meadows, and ponds.
This land grab would allow the federal government through the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers to regulate how you manage any body of water on your own private property, even though said water will never come in contact with the properties of others. They will be allowed to control what you do and how you do it and will be empowered to force you to mitigate anything they might perceive as detrimental. This will have an undeniably negative impact on millions of property owners. Those who will have to answer to someone for land and water they own will be people who manage their ponds for fishing and leisure, miners who need water to pump their mines and wells, ranchers who need watering holes for their cattle, and farmers who need to irrigate their fields.

Not only is the revised Act an affront to personal property rights, but it is also devised in strict defiance of the rights of the people as a whole. Our nation was built on a republic style of government. Rule was supposed to work from the bottom up, from local to state to national, not the other way around as we’ve become so accustomed to. The bill would only extend this ill-advised practice as it would supersede local and state laws and control.

In government, wording is – just like power - everything. Slipping that one little word “all” into the Clean Water Act’s language really can make that big a difference and allow them to steal our property rights. It’s a disaster waiting to happen, one that’s in lockstep with the continued erosion of what it really means to be an American.