Regulators gone wild

Among the worst violators of Americans' property rights are out-of-control regulators who enforce federal environmental laws. Unfortunately, our elected officials and the courts are doing little to rein in these ecological extremists.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (the Corps), along with a plethora of other federal and state agencies, have joined forces in recent decades to expand the terms of the federal Clean Water Act – particularly as it relates to property designated as wetlands – in an effort to address what they perceive as gaps in the law.

In some cases, the fervor with which these environmental regulatory agencies misapply the Clean Water Act has made fugitives of landowners, bankrupted others and left the remainder perplexed about their own property. Two of those landowners Michigan residents John Rapanos and June Carabel have been caught in a legal swamp reaching all the way to the Supreme Court.

Despite the fact that his property is 20 miles from the nearest navigable waters, the Corps claims Rapanos illegally altered a wetland. And, while Carabel's land is connected to Michigan's Lake St. Clair by man-made ditches, the Corps considers these conveyances "navigable waters" over which it has jurisdiction.

Read more