who cares about precedent?

Not an editorialist from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, apparently. In this Sunday piece, he argues that Wisconsin officials should race to approve the City of New Berlin's application to divert Great Lakes water in advance of any binding diversion rules. He thus falls prey to the kind of parochialism that the Great Lakes Compact was in theory designed to stop.

This would be the first diversion authorized under the Compact, ratified by Congress last October. Doing so without rules (or lawlessly, as it were) would entitle other states to justify their own exemptions and special cases.

It doesn't help that the writer casts the villains as "some environmental groups," apparently assuming this makes for a chilling specter.

No, the villains are citizens who care about defending the Great Lakes.

Even -- or especially -- in the case of New Berlin, access to Great Lakes water is a privilege, not a right.

Comments

[James Rowen]

Nicely done.

Unfortunately, there are still people in Wisconsin, and presumably elsewhere, who don't get the notion of Public Trust though it is embedded in Wisconsin's constitution.