Big Government: The EPA is now claiming the authority to bypass courts and, on its own, garnish the paychecks and attach the assets of those it accuses of violating its rules. And, as with the IRS, its hard drives also crash.
The Environmental Protection Agency's insatiable lust for power has now gone beyond being the pen and the phone for President Obama's climate change, bypassing both the Constitution and the Congress in enacting rules and regulations that the American people and their representatives did not enact or even support.
Through an announcement in the Federal Register, the agency is claiming that existing federal law allows it "to garnish non-Federal wages to collect delinquent non-tax debts owed the United States without first obtaining a court order." It claims such authority under the Debt Collection Improvement Act of 1996.
These non-tax debts are fines and penalties that the EPA has levied against alleged polluters who often are innocent — farmers, for example, making common-sense decisions in running their daily lives and businesses, who discover a ditch that they dug is now considered a wetland because rainwater occasionally fills it.
"The EPA has a history of overreaching its authority. It seems like once again the EPA is trying to take power it doesn't have away from American citizens," Sen. John Barrasso, Wyoming Republican, said when he learned of the EPA's wage-garnishment scheme, according to the Washington Times.
The EPA authoritarian edicts include recently slapping a $75,000 a day — yes, a day — fine on Wyoming homeowner Andy Johnson for building a pond on his rural property to provide water for his cattle where the Six Mile Creek runs across his land.
The EPA, our environmental judge, jury and enforcer, declared that the Johnson family was in violation of the Clean Water Act. The EPA charged the Johnsons with "the discharge of pollutants (i.e., dredged or fill material) into the waters of the United States" for building a dam without getting a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers.
According to the EPA, Johnson needed a permit not just from the state of Wyoming, which he had, but also from the Corps of Engineers because Six Mile Creek runs into Black Forks River, which runs into the Green River — a "navigable, interstate water of the United States."
By that definition, average Americans could be fined for washing their cars in their driveways.