The Clean Water Protection Act would overturn a 2002 Bush
administration rule change that allowed coal mining companies to
create valley fills while burying thousands of miles of streams
in the practice of mountaintop removal mining. The rule change
also allows other industries to dump waste in waters under the
guise of renaming the waste material as "fill." But this is not
just about mountaintop removal mining. The U.S. Supreme Court
recently heard oral arguments in a case involving an Alaskan
gold mine that was issued a permit to dump contaminated mine
tailings into a lake in the Tongass National Forest because the
government called the waste "fill." The Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals ruled that the Bush administration's change to the
definition of "fill" material to permit waste disposal could not
be applied to the discharges in question involving the gold
mine, and the Supreme Court is reviewing that decision. Today's
bill introduction represents a bipartisan effort to bring back
the law as it existed pre