Obama's Game is Afoot, Hidden From View

Obama’s executive branch is by-passing Congress again.

According to reports from the Farm Bureau, virtually all waters of the United States could soon fall under regulatory control of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), if that agency succeeds as it intends in expanding the scope of the Clean Water Act. This is one of the hard-played games that goes hand-in-hand with the creation of czars and bureaucratic bodies to write rules without Congressional approval of appointments. It also fits with the president’s very aggressive use of executive orders to do as he damn well pleases. 

In this case, the new Guidance Document prepared by the EPA features a fresh interpretation of how it should carry out the law, expanding its authority well beyond what congress authorized in the Clean Water Act, and contrary to limits imposed by the Supreme Court. Currently, the EPA’s reach is limited to “navigable” waters. This is the little word they wish to draw a line through to give themselves new jurisdiction over any wet area, even temporary ones – presumably your backyard kiddie pool or koi pond. Rep. Bob Gibbs, a member of the House Agriculture Committee says, “Every puddle could be under EPA jurisdiction.”

Expanded jurisdiction rarely goes unused.

If such things as Obamacare, Obama’s financial reforms, various and sundry agencies’ expansion of their jurisdictions like this end run around Congress mounted by the EPA are successful, we are looking at an unbridled explosion of new government jobs. Obamacare creates an estimated 8,000 new I.R.S. enforcer jobs right out of the gate. This EPA power grab would require an untold number of new puddle inspectors and paperwork pushers.

Where does this end?

Much of this expansion-of-authority activity is hidden from the public and rarely reported by mainstream media. Some nameless EPA officials making changes in EPA regulatory power within the Clean Water Act must seem a fairly obscure topic for mainstream news journalists and cable TV pundits – if they notice it at all.  

But if you read the trade journals from nearly 100 different industries and professions as I do for my work, from the Farm Bureau publications to Nation’s Restaurant News to Dental Economics to Insurance Professional to Publisher’s Weekly, etc., etc., you will find the exact same kind of government agency expansion underway in every industry. Alone in each, but together in unheard concert.

Connect these obscure dots, each in a different field, and you have a profound and dangerous pattern. A scheme. A game afoot. The rewriting of hundreds if not thousands of laws without the legislative body’s involvement, affecting virtually every aspect of commerce and every nook ‘n cranny of our lives, producing a need for a veritable army of new government agents, inspectors, analysts, enforcers and supervisors.

If the media doesn’t connect the dots and reveal the scheme, the public will remain blind to it – except for the one thing that might affect them. Farmers are scrambling to support H.R. 4965, which would stop the EPA from enacting its self-expansion of authority. But these farmers can’t be aware of the identical kind of power-grabs and re-writing of laws affecting or threatening the health care industry, the restaurant industry, nearly each and every industry, even though virtually all these hidden power expansions will ultimately affect farmers and all of us.

The rapid rendering of congress as impotent and irrelevant, and the assumption of its powers and circumvention of its service to us in protecting against unfettered government expansion should worry us all. It would worry more if they saw it in total.