CHARLESTON — West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey is pleased the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to revisit a case focusing on the legal doctrine known as Chevron Deference.
Morrisey led an 18-state coalition asking the court to review the case that involves a National Marine Fisheries Service requirement for commercial fishermen to pay for at-sea monitoring.
“We’re happy that the court has decided to revisit the Chevron doctrine, a misguided doctrine under which courts defer to legally dubious interpretations of statutes put out by federal administrative agencies,” Morrisey said. “We led a state amicus brief explaining that now was the right time to take a hard look at that issue, and the Court obviously agreed.”
Morrisey
The case – Loper Bright Enterprises v. Gina Raimondo, Secretary of Commerce – revolves around a regulation by the NMFS that requires herring fishing boats to have an additional person on board to serve as a monitor, tracking compliance with federal regulation. But the fishing companies must pay the monitor, which would cost around $700 per day.
The question raised in the case is whether the Magnuson-Stevens Act “implicitly grants the National Marine Fisheries Service the power to force domestic vessels to pay the salaries of the monitors they must carry."
Applying “Chevron Deference,” the lower court held that it did. The petition asked whether the court should overrule Chevron, or at least clarify that statutory silence concerning controversial powers expressly but narrowly granted elsewhere in the statute.
Chevron Deference provides “principles to determine the extent to which a court reviewing agency action should give deference to the agency’s construction of a statute that the agency has been delegated to administer,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
The theory is based on a 1982 decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council under which courts generally defer to the expertise of agencies in adopting regulations within their area of expertise.
According to the Morrisey-led brief, the doctrine has been abused and manipulated to allow federal agencies to run amuck.
“Congress’s words matter, not agencies’ policy preferences. And agencies shouldn’t be permitted to take advantage of statutory silence to extend their powers beyond what Congress intended,” Morrisey said. “For too long, though, the Chevron doctrine has empowered agencies to do just that.
“We see this as an important extension of our work in West Virginia v. EPA and other recent administrative-law cases. Congress should pass laws, judges should construe them, and unelected bureaucrats should stick to their job of just implementing those laws — not rewriting them. We look forward to explaining over the coming weeks and months why the Court should take a step back from Chevron and return power where it belongs.”
Morrisey was joined in the amicus brief by attorneys general from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia.
U.S. Supreme Court case number 22-451
