Whereas access to clean water is a fundamental human right; Whereas the Federal Water Pollution Control Act was enacted into law in 1948; Whereas the Federal Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972 were enacted with bipartisan support and significantly reorganized and expanded the law, from then on commonly known as the Clean Water Act; Whereas the Clean Water Act is one of the most important laws in the United States and the Nation’s principal safeguard against unregulated pollution or destruction of United States surface waters; Whereas the Clean Water Act’s objective is to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters , and it declared national goals of eliminating the discharge of pollutants into the waters of the United States by 1985 and, wherever attainable, ensuring that waters were fishable and swimmable by 1983; Whereas the Clean Water Act provides strong and comprehensive requirements for the control of pollutants in the Nation’s waters; Whereas the Clean Water Act authorizes Federal financial assistance for building and upgrading municipal sewage treatment plants and other types of water quality improvements projects; Whereas rivers, streams, lakes, ponds, wetlands, and other waters have enormous public health, community welfare, economic, and ecological importance to the United States, considering— (1) one in three people in the United States receives drinking water from systems that draw supply from headwater, intermittent, or ephemeral streams; (2) according to an Environmental Protection Agency report, streams provide the majority of water to most rivers and transport sediment, wood, organic matter, nutrients, chemical contaminants, and many of the organisms found in rivers ; (3) chemical, physical, and biological processes in streams can convert nitrogen and other nutrients, preventing them from causing downstream harm; (4) wetlands prevent and minimize flooding by storing as much as 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 gallons of water per acre