If Your Property Gets Rained On, It Might Be Federal Land

The “Waters of the United States”  rule is back, having been neutered years ago by Pres. Donald Trump.

This “rule” brings puddles and creeks under federal jurisdiction, subject to the whims of the Environment Protection Agency. Formerly it only impacted “navigable waters,” which was bad enough. One can only imagine how this will be applied, and against whom.

Such rules can price property owners and businesses off their land once the EPA renders it useless because compliance is so onerous for many. The big boys however don’t mind such rules because they can pay to comply. Whereas the costs of breaking such rules can hardly be borne by their smaller competitors. 

OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration) does the same thing, forcing needless upgrades to safety equipment that has worked fine so far.

“In granting an injunction Sunday [affecting Texas and Idaho], Judge Jeffrey Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas said the rule exceeds the EPA’s authority… The unlawful rule would have saddled Texans across the state with crushing new regulations, slowing our state’s economic development and limiting our job growth … This is an important victory protecting the people of Texas from destructive federal overreach.” See TexasAG for details.

Thankfully there are still federal judges who have concerns about federal agencies exceeding their authority. Federal “overreach” is one of the primary focuses of Convention of States, so we are thrilled to see such descriptions used in such cases.

The same issue arises when considering the Securities and Exchange Commission’s intended expansion of its congressional mandate to the point where it gains authority to regulate digital assets. 

The 1933 Act that created the SEC did not assign crypto currencies to the SEC’s jurisdiction, obviously, since they didn’t exist at the time. That hasn’t stopped the SEC Chairman, Gary Gensler, from prosecuting a year-long lawsuit to force major crypto company Ripple to pay a huge fine for selling its XRP tokens as “unregistered securities.”

Ripple sells shares of its company as an actual security, so how Gensler or his predecessor can insist that their XRP token is a security remains unknown. We will revisit this topic once the lawsuit is over, thankfully it seems like the SEC has done everything wrong and Ripple stands a good chance of winning. The supervising judge, Analisa Torres, has scant appreciation for how the SEC has handled the case so far, deservedly so.

It seems obvious to me and many others that the purpose of the lawsuit was to destroy Ripple and other cryptos to hand the entire market to the likes of JP Morgan, BNY Mellon, Goldman Sachs (Gensler’s former employer) and others. Our government believes that they deserve to hold crypto in custody or sell it on the open market, not these new innovative companies that are being suppressed in the US but basically nowhere else that matters.

Yes, a major problem with our government is the unelected runaway federal agencies that dictate rules and regs for businesses and homeowners to comply with, while the Constitution is silent on such accumulation of power in the hands of unconstitutional agencies.

It has been said that congress doesn’t have time to handle the entire environment, or the burgeoning crypto industry, or race relations, etc., so it delegates authority to these ABC Agencies. If the Constitution doesn’t give authority to congress to solve every problem in the world, how does congress delegate it to these agencies?

Convention of States seeks to amend the Constitution to prevent such overreach. Article V of the Constitution gives the states the power to call a convention of states to do so. Congress is never going to curtail its own overreach, so the states were given power in such circumstances to rescue themselves. Please go to Convention of States to learn more, and sign our petition. 

We’ll keep fighting for you until you join us, then we’ll fight together.