The Supreme Court on Friday ruled in favor of a group of fishermen who had challenged a decades-old legal doctrine that they said gave the administrative state too much power over fishing.
In a 6-2 decision, the Supreme Court majority, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson not joining, said that federal regulations issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) requiring fishermen to pay $700 a day to “offshore observers” exceeded the scope of the mandate Congress had set for that federal agency.
In January, the Supreme Court heard two lawsuits brought by fishermen in New Jersey and herring fishermen in Rhode Island who said NOAA’s rules could destroy their livelihoods.
The Supreme Court’s decision runs counter to a principle known as the Chevron doctrine, a legal theory established in the 1980s that holds that when a federal regulation is challenged, courts should defer to an agency’s interpretation of whether Congress granted it the authority to issue the rule, unless the agency’s interpretation is reasonable and Congress has not directly addressed the issue.
The Supreme Court appears poised to rein in the administrative state in a landmark case from East Coast fishermen.
The Supreme Court will convene in Washington on Wednesday, June 29, 2022. (AP Photo/Jacqueline Martin)
“How do we determine how much deference is too much deference?” Justice Clarence Thomas asked during nearly four hours of arguments earlier this year. “How do we know where the line is?”
Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh appeared to be the most skeptical of the Justice Department’s arguments in dismissing Chevron’s lawsuit, with Gorsuch at one point questioning whether Chevron had a “disproportionate impact” on people who “have no power to influence government agencies.”
Supreme Court expresses interest in hearing major climate change case that could be a “nightmare” for liberals
“The cases that I see on a daily basis on the appeals court are immigrants, veterans seeking pensions, Social Security disability applicants — they have no power to affect government agencies, government agencies never have control over them, and generally speaking, their interests are not the kinds of things that people vote for. And I think that’s the bane of a lot of lower court judges,” Gorsuch said.
“[I] “There are no cases cited where Chevron has benefited those people, and there are probably cases that I’ve missed. And the argument can be made that Chevron has had this disparate impact on different classes of people, and it certainly seems to me that the other side makes this argument forcefully,” he said.
Click here to get the FOX News app
Gorsuch called Chevron a “destabilizing force.”
This is a developing story, check back for updates.
