Tag Archives: the bureaucracy

Court open to upholding US fishing monitor rule even without ‘Chevron’ doctrine

A U.S. appeals court on Monday appeared open to upholding a federal rule requiring commercial fishermen to fund a program to monitor for overfishing of herring off New England’s coast even after the U.S. Supreme Court in that same case issued a landmark ruling curbing agencies’ regulatory power. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, during oral arguments, weighed the impact of the U.S. Supreme Court’s June decision, opens new tab to scrap a 40-year-old legal doctrine that had required courts to defer to agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous laws they administer. The 6-3 conservative majority U.S. Supreme Court nixed the doctrine, known as “Chevron deference,” after taking up an appeal by several commercial fishing companies of the D.C. Circuit panel’s 2-1 ruling in August 2022, opens new tab that had relied on the doctrine to uphold the fishing rule. more, >>CLICK TO READ<< 07:03

An Optimist’s view: Death of the Chevron Deference

My name is David Goethel. I am a 55 year plus commercial fisherman, research biologist and former fishery manager. As author of Endangered Species/Chronicles of A new England Fisherman I discuss these topics and a lawsuit I filed in 2015 with the legal group Cause of Action over the legal concept known as Chevron Deference. Most people believe Congress writes laws, the Executive Branch carries out those laws and the Judicial Branch interprets and clarifies whether aspects of those laws are Constitutional and correctly applied. It turns out under a doctrine called “Chevron Deference” the regulatory bureaucracy can deem a law unclear or ambiguous and create any regulation the agency decides it needs to carry out its bureaucratic function. Until this past Friday, the courts gave deference to the regulators as the “recognized experts” even though no proof is required and no test for ambiguity is applied. The Supreme Court overturned Chevron Friday saying they had “placed a tombstone on its grave”. Fishermen, including me, had sued saying that unelected regulators should not have this vast power over our lives. more, >>CLICK TO READ<< 20:18

The Age of Petty Tyrannies

“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military. Not the one facing us across the frontier of the battle lines, which is not so much our enemy as our brothers’ enemy, but the one that calls itself our protector and makes us its slaves.,,,”  We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the name of the national good by an elite class of government officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions. We, the middling classes, are not so fortunate.,,, This is the mindset that tried to penalize a fisherman with 20 years’ jail time for throwing fish that were too small back into the water. John Yates, a commercial fisherman,,, >click to read<