“We have less fishermen now than in colonial days,” said Jerry Leeman, founder and CEO of the New England Fisherman’s Stewardship Association. “The price you pay to catch a fish is less than the market value once you’ve retrieved it.”
Last week saw the end of Chevron deference, the long-held legal standard requiring courts to defer to government agency “experts” in administering regulations. Mr. Leeman is among those celebrating the decision in Relentless v. Dept. of Commerce and Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of a group of fishermen required by the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to pay for observers aboard their fishing crafts, upending the 40-year reign of Chevron Doctrine, with major implications for the size and scope of government regulations stifling American industry.
The fishermen argued that being forced to follow rules by unelected officials violated their Constitutional rights.
“From now on, NOAA and other federal agencies will have to think about the consequences of their actions without the benefit of Chevron,” Meghan Lapp, a plaintiff in the Relentless case, told National Fishermen. “We finally have an even playing field in the courts, and the government will have to pay its own regulators’ salaries without forcing that cost directly on hard-working fishermen. I’m so grateful.”
Fishermen Celebrate the Death of Chevron Deference
In an opinion piece for Seacoastonline, commercial fisherman David Goethel explained the disconnect between how Americans assume legislation works and how it works in practice.
“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 that 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.”
Mr. Goethel is the author of Endangered Species: Chronicles of the Life of a New England Fisherman. He has worked in commercial fishing for 55 years. The at-sea government monitors were costing him $700-$900 a day–often more than the value of the day’s catch.
“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.”
“Overreach and Overwatch”
Jerry Leeman has spent over 15 years of his life at sea. He blames extreme government overreach for destroying a once-critical New England industry and national food source, claiming 94% of seafood consumed in the U.S. is imported.
“Why are we restricting U.S. harvesters from providing wild, local, heart-healthy product that is environmentally friendly and sustainable?” he asked in an interview with Morning Wire. “And meanwhile, we’re purchasing product from other nations that do not abide by our rules and regulations.”
Mr. Leeman said fishing companies were being forced to pay government observers more than they were paying their own crew members.
These observers were often not prepared for life at sea.
“These are people that come straight from college, little to no experience at sea, and here in New England we have variable weather. I mean, it’s not very nice out there in the winter months. So now you have somebody that doesn’t even know if they get seasick, trapped on a vessel with us for 10 days, and now it’s our responsibility to monitor them and to keep them safe. It was a lot of overreach.”
“It’s just more overreach and overwatch. I mean, we have less fishermen every year, and yet now they want 100% coverage. We haven’t even broken any rules or laws, so why are we having to pay to have somebody watch us around the clock?”
Critics Fear a Future without Chevron
Not everyone is happy to see Chevron go, saying its demise opens the door for corrupt corporate influence and leaves consumers unprotected.
Congress will now be accountable for the laws they write without a faceless, unelected bureaucracy to blame for the implementation of those laws. In theory at least, Congress will need to pass clearer, simpler laws, and then answer to the voters for their impact. Shadow operators who have relied on the protection of Chevron to sue for their preferred outcomes and pass the legal bills onto the taxpayer, as well as the bureaucracy itself, have lost cover.
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and people spending other people’s money do not apply any means test or spend said money as if it were their own,” Mr. Goethel wrote. “No more hiding behind Chevron and passing the expense on to the regulated. Expenses will now have to be justified and scrutinized by Congress, the only legal taxing authority. Hopefully, life is about to get simpler and less expensive.”
More Needed to Resucitate a Struggling American Industry
While calling the Loper decision that overturned Chevron the “first good step in the right direction in a long time,” Mr. Leeman says more is needed to restore the American fishing industry.
While American colleges teach fisheries management, they don’t teach the fundamentals of fishing. In the 1980s and 1990s, many schools still taught marine trades. That focus is gone, leaving the U.S. with a “crippled fleet.”
“We teach how fishing management works based on surveys, allocations, and statistical committees. But as far as using trawl gear, migrational patterns of our stocks, and how to harvest responsibly and sustainability, mending is a big part of trawling, we don’t really teach that as well. We have no educational classes of getting fundamental, educated employees to get the job done safely in a manageably environmentally friendly way.”
The solution, Mr. Leeman believes, is hands-on training from current fisheries willing to teaching the next generation of American fishermen. But time is ticking. The ranks of legacy fishermen are dwindling, with no one to pass their knowledge on to. When that knowledge is lost, it will be gone forever.
“I think there is time to still salvage that knowledge and pass it on to the next generation, which will go back to the food securities of this nation. I mean, it’s one thing to say we have it, but we have to be able to harvest it, to provide it to the U.S. consumer, and to do so in a responsible, sustainable way, so this way our food securities of the nations are here for the longevity.”
