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Nearly 40 years ago, in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the Supreme Court ruled that courts should defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of an ambiguous statute as long as that interpretation is reasonable. On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to reconsider its ruling in Chevron.
The question comes to the court in a case brought by a group of commercial fishing companies. They challenged a rule issued by the National Marine Fisheries Service that requires the fishing industry to pay for the costs of observers who monitor compliance with fishery management plans.
Relying on Chevron, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected the companies’ challenge to the rule. Judge Judith Rogers explained that although federal fishery law makes clear that the government can require fishing boats to carry monitors, it does not specifically address who must pay for the monitors. Because the NMFS’s interpretation of federal fishery law as authorizing industry-funded monitors was a reasonable one, Rogers concluded, the court should defer to that interpretation.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 17, @12:04PM
Something can still be unreasonable, even if Congress genuinely thinks otherwise. One shouldn't have to say that.
More likely, this was just more half-assed law.
Even so, the NOAA doesn't have a blank check to implement such regulation. For a hypothetical example, suppose an agency could implement this law in such a way that it has a fixed cost of $10k per boat or $10k per month per boat. Why would it ever do the latter? A: to obstruct the industry in question (by increasing the cost of compliance with regulation), solicit bribes (selectively deciding how costly the compliance with regulation could be), or to push some political agenda (like creating some bullshit jobs for a friendly labor union).
The problem is that a lot of unreasonable interpretations are sliding in this gap.