The Biden administration and its Republican adversaries are gearing up for an epic showdown over environmental protections for streams and wetlands throughout America — protections that the Trump administration aggressively stripped away, leaving farmers and developers free to pollute many inland waterways at will. The new administration is taking a measured approach that wouldn't return fully to Obama-era rules that even moderate voices thought were overly onerous for farmers.

But that nod toward compromise is already falling on deaf ears in the GOP, which wants the status quo of a wild-west approach to water protection. That approach is unacceptable.

The federal Clean Water Act was one of the first modern environmental laws, and among the most important ever created. Written half a century ago, it recognized the immense role that waterways play for the nation's environmental health — and how easier pollution spreads once it's introduced into those waterways. It created standards for discharge for industry and agriculture.

The Obama administration expanded the act by dramatically broadening the list of waterways to which it applied, looping in thousands of smaller streams and rivers. The rationale was a sound one: Fertilizers, pesticides and industrial waste dumped into even small waterways will eventually make it into larger waterways, given the nature of natural water systems. But critics said the new rules were overreaching against, particularly, farmers, to the point of regulating even small drainage ditches on their own property.

While the Obama rules may have required some moderation, the Trump administration went to the opposite extreme, gutting the standards to the point that, environmentalists warn, it poses a genuine risk not just to the health of waterway systems but the drinking water Americans get from their taps. It was part of former President Donald Trump's broader campaign to undermine environmental laws across the board, partly in fealty to industry and partly as a politically motivated thumb in the eye to progressives — and, especially to former President Barack Obama, whose significant environmental legacy Trump was determined to erase.

Trump's environmental mischief had real and almost immediate consequences. It allowed more than 300 water-polluting projects to go forward that would have been restricted under the Obama rules, including major new mining endeavors that could affect some of the nation's most pristine waterways and ultimately impact drinking water.

Biden's EPA isn't seeking a full return to the Obama rules but rather a more moderate middle ground between those rules and Trump's evisceration of any reasonable standards at all. Compromise of that kind is how politics is supposed to work but hasn't in years. If Democrats and Republicans are to rediscover the ability to reach agreement on policy issues, what better issue to start with than the crucial one of the very water Americans drink?

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