WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to consider overturning a nearly 40-year precedent by taking up a challenge to a regulation affecting fishing vessels in a case that is the latest conservative-led attack on federal bureaucracy.
The court will weigh whether to overturn a much-cited 1984 ruling, Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, which said courts should defer to federal agencies in their interpretations of the law when the language of the statute is ambiguous.
Attempts to overturn that ruling, which the court has rarely invoked in recent years, is just one avenue of attack by conservative groups and business interests as part of what has been dubbed “the war on the administrative state.”
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, is skeptical of broad assertions of federal agency power.
The case itself is a challenge to a government regulation that requires fishing vessels to help fund the collection of scientific data to assist with fishery conservation and management. The court could still rule in favor of the challengers by limiting the scope of the Chevron decision without overturning it entirely.
The court took up an appeal brought by Loper Bright Enterprises and several other operators of fishing vessels that are active in the herring fishery off the Atlantic coast and challenged the 2020 rule applying to New England fisheries.
The challengers say that the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal body that oversees ocean resources, did not have authority to issue the regulation under the relevant law, the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act.
The rule implements a monitoring program that vessel operators are required to fund. As the challengers put it, operators have to pay up to $710 dollars a day at certain times for independent observers to board their vessels and monitor their operations. The cost is a significant burden on small owner-operators, the challengers say.
The case, backed by conservative groups, is the latest attempt to undermine the power of federal agencies. Lawyers for the fishing vessel operators say that a lower court that upheld the rule gave too much deference to the federal agency in interpreting the 1976 law.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected the vessel operators’ claims in an August 2022 decision, upholding a similar ruling issued by a federal district court judge the previous year.
The brief Supreme Court order noted that liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is not participating in the case. She was originally part of the appeals court panel that decided the case before President Joe Biden appointed her to the high court. She heard oral arguments but was not involved in the ruling itself.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
