Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Kind of Fishy?

 The Chevron ruling of the Supreme Court has in my opinion over the decades been one of the worst. Simply stated, Chevron says if Congress passes a law and it is not well written then the Administrative agency responsible for its administration can interpret the law as it sees fit no matter what. In effect it establishes an independent Governmental body composed solely on bureaucrats whose person opinions control what happens.

The latest is the herring case where the Government Administrators demand that fishing vessels have monitors and that the vessel must pay the monitors salary. As Turley notes:

The cases today concern federal requirements that commercial fishermen pay for at-sea monitors. Herring fishermen in New Jersey and Rhode Island are challenging the law in a case with a long list of amicus filings on both sides from groups, politicians, and businesses. The fishermen say that the monitors could put them out of business, costing up to 20 percent of their annual revenues in a business that is already marginal for profits. They argue that the government wants monitors (which they do not necessarily oppose) but lacked the funds. The decision was made to shift the costs to the fishermen and then citing Chevron to curtail judicial review.

 Chevron was always a problem. Congress can be sloppy and then let the uncontrolled bureaucrats make the decisions and having the taxpayers pay the costs of these often politically divergent acts. Hopefully Chevron is overturned. In my opinion and my experience this is worse than Roe.