McCaskill's 'Waters of the US' position questioned

Democrat Claire McCaskill, Missouri's senior U.S. senator, was among the voices last week supporting the Trump administration's proposal to roll back the Environmental Protection Agency's controversial "Waters of the United States" regulation.

"I've never been shy about calling out our government when rules and regulations don't work for Missouri," McCaskill said in a news release. "That's why I opposed this rule from the Obama Administration."

But the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, last week accused McCaskill of hypocrisy, saying: "It's so clear that her comments are just election year posturing and, if she has the chance down the road, she'll side with the liberal environmentalists and against Missouri's farmers."

McCaskill said she has worked consistently in the Senate to roll back unreasonable federal rules and regulations, and said she agreed with the EPA's overall goal of "keeping our waters free of pollution."

But, she said, the "waters" rule - often called WOTUS - "went too far for our farmers, ranchers, and landowners."

McCaskill said she's opposed the WOTUS regulation since 2015, telling the EPA in 2015 it needed to "go back to the drawing board."

She pointed to her support for bipartisan legislation sponsored by U.S. Sens. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, and Joe Donnelly, D-Indiana, that would have directed the EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to issue a revised rule that would have protected waterways from pollution, McCaskill said, while also protecting farmers, ranchers, and private landowners.

That bill would have required a rule that didn't include regulation of bodies of water such as isolated ponds, ditches, agriculture water, stormwater, groundwater or streams without enough flow to carry pollutants to navigable waters.

However, that legislation never was passed by Congress.

McCaskill's seat is up for re-election in 2018, and the NRSC regularly sends news releases questioning her position on issues or votes she's cast in the Senate.

The NRSC last week cited three votes in the Senate where "McCaskill voted against legislation that had the potential to weaken the awful WOTUS rule."

However, McCaskill's staff explained those bills actually were more drastic than the NRSC was reporting.

"They were votes on a Congressional Review Act challenge to the rule, which if passed, would have meant the current rule would be blocked," McCaskill spokeswoman Sarah Feldman told the News Tribune in an email. "The agency would permanently be barred from ever issuing a rule with the same goal of keeping our waters clean of pollution."

Feldman pointed to a May 15 CQ Roll Call story that describes the Congressional Review Act, or CRA, as "a once obscure law" that "empowers Congress when it comes to reining in the regulatory state."

In the U.S. Senate, a CRA resolution needs only 50 votes, not 60, to be passed - and it can't be filibustered.

And McCaskill's staff points to another sentence in the CQ Roll Call story to explain McCaskill's voting against CRA resolutions even though she supported changing the "Waters of the US" rule: 'Once the CRA has been used to overturn a rule, an agency can't put forward a new rule at a later date that is 'substantially the same' to the rule that was struck down - it essentially salts the earth for any new regulations at that agency."

Feldman said McCaskill's goal was, and remains, "keeping our waters free of dangerous pollution, in a way that is reasonable for Missouri's farmers, ranchers, and private landowners - something that the EPA could and should have done in the first place."