With the real estate market already reeling, Congress would be foolish to do anything that would further drive

down property values. It would be even worse to do so while also mounting a wholesale assault on private property rights. But that's what would be done by the misnamed Clean Water Restoration Act sponsored by Rep. James Oberstar, D-MN. Oberstar's proposal is so bad it ought to be permanently buried six feet under dry land. The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate "interstate commerce." The original 1972 Clean Water Act expands that power to regulation of any "navigable waters," with the regulatory authority given to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Little by little, the Corps expanded its reach, so that it soon was not just maintaining navigability but also enforcing environmental regulations and then enforcing them not just on navigable interstate waters, but on ponds connected by ditches to streams that led into navigable waters. But when the Corps absurdly started trying to regulate low-lying land that sometimes developed puddles that might overflow into those ditches, property-rights activists fought back. In 2006, the activists earned a partial Supreme Court victory with a decision re-stating that private land is, indeed, not a navigable waterway used for interstate commerce. Now comes Oberstar, who is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. He held an April 16 committee hearing on his misnamed bill, which would vastly expand the definition of "waters" covered by stringent regulation to include almost any area, "interstate and intrastate," that ever gets wet. Oberstar set a May 1 deadline for interested parties to respond to hearing testimony. The Illinois Farm Bureau, one of dozens of farmer and rancher groups opposing the Oberstar bill, estimates that it would impose regulations on an additional 55 million acres of farmland. The dangers to unwary landowners in virtually every state are real. Before the Supreme Court reined in the Corps, Floridian Ocie Mills was forced to serve 21 months in prison for filling-in a "wetland" that is, putting clean fill-dirt on mostly dry land. U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson later blasted Mills' imprisonment as "being worthy of Alice in Wonderland" because an act about navigable waters was used to punish a man for land use. Similarly, the Oberstar bill would ignore the plain meaning of words to extend congressional power well beyond the Constitution's grant of authority over interstate commerce. Passing this bill will create more confusion, more court fights, and more travesties of justice.