Editorial - Bipartisan bill blocks EPA's 'waters' overreach

In his book "Cat's Cradle," novelist Kurt Vonnegut presents Ice-Nine, a substance with the seed-crystal-like power to turn water into a solid—and thereby end all life on Earth. That's because "everything is connected to everything else," as one of the lessons of 1960s-era environmentalism holds. And as soon as Ice-Nine touches any source of water—including, say, the flow from your faucet—then all would be lost. For the crystallization would crackle down the pipe, through the sewer, down the river and into the ocean, turning every body of water that it touches (and every person, given that we're mostly water) into a block of Ice-Nine. Pretty soon, ours would be an Ice-Nine world, as frozen as Pluto and about as inhospitable to life. A clever concept, right? And a terrific fictional construct for a novel. And, it seems, an inspiration for policy in the Obama administration, whose Environmental Protection Agency administrators must be Vonnegut fans. That's because the EPA's proposed Waters of the United States policy reads like Ice-Nine in reverse. For while the Clean Water Act gives the EPA jurisdiction over America's "navigable waters," the Waters of the United States proposal essentially cuts out the word " navigable" and extends the feds' reach all the way upstream to the ponds in some people's backyards.