Steve Southerland II

Mr. Chair, I appreciate the efforts of you and Ranking Member Rahall, and those efforts, how they have advanced this bipartisan piece of legislation. I would also like to thank Subcommittee Chairman Gibbs for giving this issue the urgent attention that it deserves.

For more than 40 years, America's waters have been made cleaner and safer by a balanced regulatory partnership between the States and the Federal Government. The basis for this partnership was a commonsense understanding that not all waters are subject to Federal jurisdiction and that the States must have the primary responsibility for regulating waters within their own boundaries.

But, now, decades of success have been put at risk under the guise of clarifying the scope of the Federal jurisdiction.

Under its proposed rules, Federal agencies like the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers would see their regulatory authority under the Clean Water Act drastically expanded, to the point of covering almost any body of water throughout America, from ditches to culverts to pipes to watersheds to farmland ponds.

This would have devastating consequences on virtually every major section of our economy, including farming, construction, manufacturing, transportation, and energy development.

That is why I have introduced H.R. 5078, the Waters of the United States Regulatory Overreach Protection Act of 2014. Our bipartisan bill draws a line in the sand that preserves the critical Federal-State partnership in place today.

By preventing the EPA and the Corps of Engineers from finalizing or implementing the proposed rule, we are providing a safeguard against the Federal Government's overreach into regulatory decisions best made by officials at the State and local levels.

We are also requiring the EPA and the Corps to consult with the State and local officials to form a consensus proposal on the scope of the future water regulations under the Clean Water Act.

This bill is not anti-environment. It is not anti-clean water. Our bill preserves the partnership we have had in place for years to strengthen the health of our waterways and manage our water quality, and it does so in a way that maintains certainty for our job creators.

For these reasons, I urge all of my colleagues to support this bipartisan bill.

Mr. Chairman, I have an amendment at the desk.

Mr. Chairman, I yield myself as much time as I may consume.

I rise today in support of the Southerland-Tierney-Jones amendment, a bipartisan provision that reaffirms, for the third time, the House's intent that no funding under the underlying bill should be allocated for new limited access privilege programs, also known as catch shares in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico fisheries.

Catch shares is a fishery management tool that allocates a portion of a once-open public fishery to a select group of fishermen, forcing the others off the water and out of business. Put more simply, it is cap- and-trade for the oceans.

Our bipartisan amendment takes a big step towards halting the perpetuation of economic harm on our coastal communities, one of which my family has lived in for 200 years.

Let me be clear, our amendment has zero impact on catch shares already in place. If you have catch shares now, you will have them tomorrow, but we owe our fishermen a voice in addressing these issues through the House and Senate reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Management Act before we consider funding for the development, implementation, or approval of new catch share programs. That is proper process. It is common sense.

I encourage all of my colleagues from both sides of the aisle to support this bipartisan Southerland-Tierney-Jones amendment and preventing the funding of development, implementation, and approval of new catch share programs going forward.

Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Chairman, I also want to remind my colleagues that no one was a greater champion of my amendment than former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank. He is definitely a stalwart in New England fisheries. So though he is not here, his spirit in favor of this amendment rings true.

I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Austin Scott).

Mr. Chairman, I yield back the balance of my time.

Offered By: Mr. Southerland

Amendment No. 24: At the end of the bill (before the short

title), insert the following: