In a session rife with momentous decisions, one of the most consequential made by the Supreme Court recently has humble origins on the decks of New England fishing boats.
After years of operating in one of the most regulated industries in the nation, New England herring boat operators challenged the federal government’s power.
They wanted to level the playing field. And that meant taking down a 40-year precedent known as the Chevron deference doctrine.
That precedent required courts to defer to agencies’ “reasonable interpretations” where statutes are ambiguous. This gave sweeping authority to federal agencies to issue rules and regulations.
It allowed federal agencies to write the rules, enforce the rules, and adjudicate disputes over those rules.
On June 28, the Supreme Court overturned Chevron in its decision in Loper Bright et al v. Raimondo, argued in tandem with Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce.
The decision will have wide-ranging effects, from environmental regulation and labor laws to health care costs, student debt relief, artificial intelligence, and more.
For instance, the federal labor and employment agencies have both published sweeping new rules in the past year. Many have been challenged in court, and lawsuits are pending. These cases will offer an early test of how overturning Chevron has shifted the balance of power.
The Loper Bright ruling has already been cited in a Texas case challenging a new Department of Labor rule imposing minimum weekly salary requirements on all white-collar workers, New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) senior litigation counsel John Vecchione told The Epoch Times.
Those defending the Chevron doctrine say the decision has dealt a severe blow to the ability of federal agencies to do their jobs.
“The Supreme Court just made it a whole lot easier for Big Oil and other corporate polluters to dismantle environmental and health laws like the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act,” the Natural Resource Defense Council wrote on its website.
The group stated that the courts will now take on a policymaking role that the Constitution did not intend and that the decision has stripped federal agencies tasked with protecting public health and safety and the environment, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration, of their power to interpret the laws they enforce.
And it all flows from a dispute that pitted New England fishing vessel operators against the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), which sits under the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
A Bridge Too Far
Three commercial herring fishing vessels fought a federal rule requiring them to pay third-party monitors $700 per day to ride on their boats, collect data for fishing conservation and management in the Atlantic Ocean, and enforce fisheries regulations.“Federal law requires that we take federal observers on our boats, and we had been complying for years,” plaintiff Meghan Lapp, fisheries liaison of Seafreeze Ltd., told The Epoch Times.
But she said she believes that the NMFS went too far when it decided to expand its monitoring program without congressional funding. The agency told the herring boat operators that they would have to pay for the monitors.
“Imagine having to pay out of pocket to have someone on your boat, monitoring your work, who makes more each day than your crew,” Ms. Lapp said.
Although the new federal rule required only herring fishermen to pay for the monitors, it was written in such a way that it could be expanded to all New England fisheries.
“That’s when we sued,” she said.
The suit argued that NMFS had no authority to force fishing operators to pay for their observers. A district court disagreed, reasoning that Congress left that question open for the agency to decide.
Applying Chevron, the court deferred to NMFS’s order that the boat owners should pay. A federal appeals court affirmed this decision.
Counsel Comes Aboard
The case was the perfect test of Chevron and exactly what the NCLA had been looking for, according to Mr. Vecchione, so the firm volunteered to represent the plaintiffs.“When NCLA was founded less than seven years ago, taking down Chevron deference was priority number one, because agencies have used it so often to violate people’s civil liberties,” NCLA President Mark Chenoweth wrote on the firm’s website.
Mr. Vecchione said, “The lower courts, particularly Judge Smith in Rhode Island, said the rule [requiring fishing operators to pay for monitors] was ambiguous, but he was bound by Chevron deference.
“We had two cases where the lower courts had been very clear that the only way their agencies prevailed was because the courts were deferring to the agencies’ view of the law.”
So they appealed to the Supreme Court, which in May 2023 announced that it would hear the case.
Either Chevron would be upheld or it would be overturned, but there was no way for the Supreme Court to avoid addressing the issue, Mr. Vecchione said.
He argued the case before the Supreme Court in January.
One discussion distilled the argument for Ms. Lapp.
“During the hearing, Justice Kavanaugh observed that, if a citizen is suing a citizen, we rule on what the law is. But if a citizen is suing the government, we defer to the government, and that shouldn’t be,” she said.
If you sue the government under Chevron you’re at an immediate disadvantage in court, according to Ms. Lapp.
“That’s certainly not what our Founders envisioned,” she said.
Landing the Victory
On June 28, the Supreme Court sided with the fishermen in a 6–3 decision, which effectively overturned Chevron deference.The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
They held that “courts may not defer to an agency interpretation of the law simply because a statute is ambiguous.”
Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“In one fell swoop, the majority today gives itself exclusive power over every open issue—no matter how expertise-driven or policy-laden—involving the meaning of regulatory law,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the dissent.
“As if it did not have enough on its plate, the majority turns itself into the country’s administrative czar.”
Ms. Lapp said the ruling is the culmination of almost a decade of work to protect the rights of fishermen.
“We finally saw a return to ‘equal justice under law’ as inscribed above the Supreme Court entrance,” she said. “We finally have a level playing field in the courts.”
Mr. Chenoweth said the group’s fisherman clients “have landed the biggest catch of their lives by persuading the U.S. Supreme Court to take its thumb off the scale when ordinary Americans are contesting unlawful government regulations.”
The ruling is long overdue, Mr. Vecchione said.
“To allow agencies to pick the pocket of the regulated without congressional authorization is against all the principles of representative government and our constitutional structure,” he said.
To ensure that federal agencies adhere to and fully implement the decision, the NCLA is forming the “Relentless Working Group.”
This coalition of public interest groups and others will fight to prevent agencies from thwarting or ignoring the court’s opinion—or from resorting to new forms of deference.
“The Relentless Working Group will ensure they aren’t smuggling in Chevron through some other guise,” Mr. Vecchione said.
“We are not retreating. We’re mopping up the already scattered foe.”
