Manchin push on pipeline approval remembers Seventies dam undertaking

“It’s simply actually unhealthy public coverage to mainly escape a single undertaking and say, ‘You’re going to be exempt,’” James Van Nostrand, director of the Middle for Power and Sustainable Growth on the West Virginia College School of Regulation, stated in an interview. “That’s simply horrible public coverage.”

The one related instance of Congress weighing in to approve a selected undertaking Van Nostrand might recall is the case, well-known in environmental circles, of the Tellico Dam in Tennessee.

After Congress handed the Endangered Species Act in 1973, an ichthyologist found the snail darter – a fish, not the notoriously sluggish invertebrate – in a river in Tennessee. Two years later, the Inside Division declared the snail darter an endangered species and its house, the Little Tennessee River, a crucial habitat. The declaration threatened to thwart the development of a Tennessee Valley Authority dam Congress funded in 1967.

Confronted with proof erecting the dam might wipe out the fish, the Supreme Courtroom dominated in Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, in a 6-3 vote, that constructing the dam would violate the Endangered Species Act, affirming a decrease court docket ruling.

But in 1979, led by Sen. Howard Baker, R-Tenn., Congress handed an unrelated spending invoice that exempted the dam building from the legislation. President Jimmy Carter signed the invoice however stated he regretted the Tellico Dam exception.