The Supreme Court has agreed to hear a second case that could roll back a bureaucracy-empowering legal doctrine backing a federal rule forcing fishing companies to pay for at-sea government monitoring of their catch.
The decision to hear Relentless Inc. v. Department of Commerce (court file 22-1219), came in an unsigned order on Oct. 13. No justices dissented. No reasons were given for the decision. At least four of the nine justices had to vote to grant the petition for it to move forward.
The case will be argued in January 2024 on the same day as a similar case called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (court file 22-451). The respondent in the latter case is Gina Raimondo, the U.S. secretary of commerce. The specific hearing date has not yet been determined.
The court’s ultimate ruling could alter the current balance of power among Congress, executive agencies, and the nation’s judiciary by curbing the legal underpinnings of the modern administrative state, which critics deride as an illegitimate fourth branch of government.
The decision to accept the case may foreshadow a narrowing of the application of the so-called Chevron deference doctrine that the Supreme Court enunciated in 1984. In the landmark ruling in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the nation’s highest court held that while courts “must give effect to the unambiguously expressed intent of Congress,” where courts find “Congress has not directly addressed the precise question at issue” and “the statute is silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue, the question for the court is whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.”
In other words, Chevron stands for the proposition that an executive agency’s interpretation of a statute it administers is entitled to deference unless Congress has said otherwise.
Conservatives and Republican policymakers have long been critical of the doctrine, saying it gives unelected regulators far too much power to make policy by going beyond what Congress intended when it approved various laws. The authority of regulatory agencies has been increasingly questioned in recent years as the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has grown. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch have expressed skepticism of the Chevron doctrine.
Those on the other side say the Chevron doctrine empowers an activist federal government to serve the public interest without having to seek specific congressional authorization for everything it wants to do.
The new case goes back to 2020 when the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and its National Marine Fisheries Service (NOAA Fisheries) implemented a final rule to compel fishing companies like the petitioners in this case—Relentless Inc., Huntress Inc., and Seafreeze Fleet LLC—to pay for human monitors aboard their vessels.
This is akin to making motorists pay for ride-along state troopers to monitor their speed, according to the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a nonprofit that is representing the petitioning companies.
“Paying for monitors would cost them more than $700 per day, substantially cutting into—or even exceeding—their daily fishing profits for herring,” NCLA said.
The federal Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which regulates fisheries, does not support such a rule, and Congress never authorized the government to launch such a program, the group said.
At a Heritage Foundation forum on Sept. 20 that examined the Loper Bright case, attorney Paul Clement expressed outrage over the fisheries rule, saying it is the “maritime equivalent of the forced quartering of British soldiers,” a colonial-era policy that helped to spur the American Revolution, and later, the Third Amendment to the Constitution.
Mr. Clement, who was U.S. solicitor general under President George W. Bush from July 2004 to June 2008, is the attorney for the fishing company in Loper Bright.
NCLA attorney John Vecchione hailed the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the Relentless Inc. case:
In Loper Bright, the petition states that the government has misinterpreted the Magnuson–Stevens statute, to allow the “financially onerous … payment requirement” for domestic vessels “unburdened by statutory caps.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled for the government, finding that the statute was silent on the relevant issue and that this is “either a fundamental overreading of Chevron or a powerful argument for its overruling,” according to the petition.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not participate in the decision to grant the petition in the case and has recused herself. She did this presumably because she heard arguments in the case when she was a member of the D.C. Circuit Court. She did not participate in the circuit court’s decision in the case because she was replaced on the court after President Joe Biden nominated her to the Supreme Court.
The Epoch Times has reached out to the U.S. Department of Justice for comment.
