Providing for Consideration of H.R. Protecting Speech From Government Interference Act; Providing for Consideration of H.J. Res. Providing for Congressional Disapproval of A Rule Submitted By the Department of the Army, Corps of Engineers, Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency; and S. Covid-19 Origin Act of 2023

Floor Speech

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Mr. LANGWORTHY. Madam Speaker, I rise in support of the rule, which provides consideration for three important pieces of legislation to restore trust and certainty for millions of Americans.

Specifically, I will highlight H.J. Res. 27, which would provide for congressional disapproval of the Biden administration's overreaching new Waters of the United States, or WOTUS, rule that threatens the livelihoods and survival of our Nation's farmers and rural communities.

The Biden EPA's new reinterpretation of WOTUS is a complete rejection of the Clean Water Act's decades-long, broadly accepted jurisdiction. The new rule gives the Federal Government sweeping authority over private lands and unleashes the Federal regulatory machine on private property owners, over bodies of water as small as ditches, low spots, and ephemeral drainages. And God forbid, if a farmer is perceived to have violated the EPA's vague new WOTUS regulatory framework, they could find themselves tangled in years of expensive litigation and red tape threatening their very survival as an operation.

Now, my district in western New York, in the Southern Tier, has over 800 dairy operations. These are generational farms with deep roots in our surrounding communities. My farmers, as in the case with farmers across this country, are deeply worried about how the Biden EPA's new WOTUS rule will impact the long-term survival of their operations.

Our farmers should be focused on production and growing and maintaining their operations, not hiring outside, expensive consultants to help them navigate a maze of new burdensome government regulations. They shouldn't be worried about whether farming a certain part of their land will lead to thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars in penalties, enough to put these family farms out of business. But under the Biden administration, sadly, this is just considered the cost of doing business.

Now, some might say I am speaking in hyperbole. But we have seen this play out before in 2015. We saw what an overly broad interpretation of WOTUS meant to our farmers, many of whom suffered devastating fines from an overzealous Obama-era EPA for having the audacity to manage and farm their own private lands.

So the question before us with this resolution isn't how to best regulate a pond versus a stream or a low spot. It isn't how far we should turn the dial up on regulation, forward or backward, so as to not inflict too much pain on rural America. It is a question of whether we stand for the long-term survival of American agriculture and domestic food security or whether we are willing to regulate the American farmer out of business and out of existence.

Congress has a duty to review and oppose this radical interpretation of WOTUS. I strongly support the rule, and I urge my colleagues to do the same.

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