The Clean Water Restoration Act is coming to a vote in the House of Representatives sometime very soon, and both Environment Illinois and The New York Times editorial board would like you to know how important the vote is.  The original Clean Water act, passed in 1972, was supposed to protect all the waters and wetlands in the United States, plain and simple.  However, a court case from a few years back muddied the waters of the Act (some pun intended).  As The Times puts it:

This jurisdictional confusion stems largely from a bizarre 2006 Supreme Court ruling in which the justices split three ways on which waters were protected under the act. A conservative foursome said that only permanent waters deserved protection. A liberal foursome said that all waters, including seasonal, intermittent streams, deserved protection. Seeking to split the difference, Justice Anthony Kennedy ruled that such streams as well as remote wetlands deserved protection if regulators could show a significant nexus to a navigable body of water somewhere downstream.

Based on the confusing nature of three dissenting opinions, 

the Environmental Protection Agency has dropped or delayed more than 400 cases involving suspected violations of the law illegal industrial discharges and the like. That is nearly half the agency’s entire docket. The reason cited in almost every instance was that regulators did not know whether the streams and wetlands in question were still covered under the act.

Aside from dropped cases, another direct result of this ruling is the unprotection of a good amount of the waters and wetlands in the United States.  As Environment Illinois states, 

Under the policy, 60 percent of Illinois’s few remaining wetlands and many miles of streams have lost protection and are threatened by development, pollution and destruction.  

The editorial board of The New York Times is urging Congress to pass this bill.  Since you are probably not a member of Congress, you can takepart by visiting Environment Illinois and seeing what you can do to protect the Great Lakes in addition to asking Congress to pass the Act.