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Originally Posted by Mr Downtown
But Congress only has the powers granted to it by the several states. If the states didn't have that power (to alienate their navigable waters) to begin with, they cannot pass that power on to Congress. This is not an ordinary bit of criminal or tort common law that can be overcome by positive law in statute, nor is it the kind of common law that was rendered inoperative by Erie R.R. v. Tompkins. Read the Hurlburt note cited above.
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If this were 1797, your natural law claim might find some support from Alexander Hamilton? but we now have nearly a hundred years of jurisprudence interpreting the Commerce Clause to give Congress the right to regulate basically everything, which is a good thing, otherwise we'd still have segregation. Even when a the Court has limited those powers, as was the case in 2012, when the Court rejected the government's claim that Obamacare's individual mandate was protected under the Commerce Clause, it still upheld the mandate under Congress' taxing power. The point is, even a conservative Court interprets Congress' authority very broadly and your views are way way way outside the mainstream.