Opinion: This Supreme Court term, a group of fishermen are poised to undo an injustice

The Supreme Court’s recent blockbuster cases have had to do with hot-button issues like abortion, racial preferences and guns. But this year, one of the court’s most highly anticipated cases has to do with fishermen and administrative law. Don’t be fooled. It may sound dry, but it’s a fascinating case that could upend a deep injustice in the way that courts treat people who find themselves at odds with powerful executive agencies.

In Loper-Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the court will consider whether to do away with a doctrine called Chevron deference. Chevron states that when resolving cases between administrative agencies and individuals, judges don’t engage in typical judging. Rather than applying their own considered judgment about a case, where the relevant law is “ambiguous,” the court must defer to an agency’s “reasonable” interpretation of the statute.

Put another way, where an agency is prosecuting someone and threatening them with ruinous fines or penalties, and the person alleges that the agency got the law wrong, the court must defer the agency’s interpretation so long as it’s reasonable — even if an objectively better interpretation exists.

Defenders of Chevron deference say the doctrine prevents courts from replacing the technical expertise of executive agencies with their own personal preferences. But this rationale gets judging fundamentally wrong.

The notion that out federal agencies are paragons of scientific and technical expertise or that outside advisory committees made up of agency chosen recognized experts provide genuine unadulterated expertise is the laughable part of this.

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With all due respect, I think it MAY be possible that an agency IS a “paragon of scientific and technical expertise” relative to some marxist-liberal judge.

But, that’s not even the point. The point is, I think, that all these agencies since the Clinton era have become so saturated with marxist and liberals that they are, as you say, “idiotic” in their “regulations” even though they MAY have some experts on their staff.

There’s a difference between deciding whether something is good policy (a decision that belongs with the legislature) and whether an executive agency has the authority to enact that policy in the first place, or gotten the law wrong. The latter two are plainly decisions that belong with courts, as the facts of the Loper-Bright case illustrate.
Loper-Bright concerns a statute that requires fishermen to carry a federal monitor onboard to check for potential violations of the law. The statute sets out three instances where the National Marine Fisheries Service may also require fisherman to pay for the monitor’s salary.
Though none of these circumstances apply to the fishermen in this case, the Service nonetheless issued a rule requiring them to pay. 4 family-owned, family-operated fishing companies then brought a lawsuit arguing that the agency lacks the authority to pay the monitors’ salary.
The stakes are high for the plaintiffs, who face cramped conditions onboard and already negligible profit margins, and thus stand to lose a significant portion of their livelihoods if the Service wins.
Loper-Bright requires no expertise in maritime policy and has nothing to do with whether forcing small businesses to carry the costs of a federal monitor is a good idea. Instead, it asks the straightforward legal question of what the relevant statute says. It makes little sense to delegate this legal question to an administrative agency, let alone an agency that is a party to the case.

An agency passes a law requiring selected citizens to house, feed, and shelter one of its employees and pay the employee's wages. This allows the agency to 'look good', as it lowers its operating costs, while giving its employee free food and shelter.

It also bankrupts the citizens' businesses - which is the actual aim of the regulation.

This is another part of the War on Natural Resource Harvesters, begun in the 1970s under President 'Noxious' Nixon and carried out nationwide on loggers, farmers, ranchers, miners, commercial fishermen to this day with varying degrees of success.

Signs of that success can be seen in the change from the US being a net exporter of many food stuffs to a net importer of those food items. Commercial fishing, before Nixon began his war, was the 3rd largest sector in the US Balance of Trade. Now it hardly registers. Mines were forced to close, farmland forced to lie fallow & sold off, water denied & allowed to run off to the ocean, timber trees to remain unharvested.

Now, they are even attacking food processing plants. The public remains unaware, silent, submissive, entertained, and well-fed with chemically manufactured foods. These foods require a certain amount of petroleum products to make, box and transport.

But petroleum has been deemed bad and must cease, so the food of future generations will be processed vegetation, and bugs.

Future grand kids will be astounded and horrified that their ancestors ate the flesh of animals. They will also be astoundingly ill-educated, bereft of any knowledge of civics and history, doing any calculations on a pocket machine, but unable to do any calculations without it. Reasoning, self-discipline, critical thinking will be heavily discouraged, Speech will be unintelligible as will any written word. Libraries will be burnt as America maybe the world returns to the early Dark Ages.

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