Greetings and thanks to the folks at Talking Justice for the invite to join the blog forum. My name is Jared Saylor, and I'm a press secretary at Earthjustice in Washington DC. Earthjustice is a nonprofit environmental law firm with offices across the country that represent local and national environmental, public health and community groups in litigation seeking stronger protections for our water, air, endangered speceies and public lands. Learn more about us here.

Our DC office has a policy department along with a litigation team of six attorneys with a docket of cases focusing on national and local air and water issues. We also work on DC issues as well, such as cleaning up the Anancostia River and reducing smog in the District of Columbia metropolitan region. But enough about us...

Last week Congress introduced an important bill, the Clean Water Restoration Act. This bill clarifies the original intent of Congress when it passed the Clean Water Act over 30 years ago, that federal protections should extend to all waters of the United States. Last year, the Supreme Court offered a muddied ruling in two clean water cases (Rapanos and Carabell). With over 160 co-sponsors, the Clean Water Restoration Act removes the word "navigable" from the Clean Water Act and declares the intent that federal protections should extend to all waters of the United States, including streams, wetlands, rivers and lakes.

Stay tuned as a Senate version of the bill is expected to drop later this summer.