Two fishermen slapped the Biden administration with a lawsuit that says Congress and several unelected councils are unconstitutionally regulating and overseeing fisheries.
Commercial fishermen George Arnesen of Louisiana and Ryan Bradley of Mississippi argue that Congress has placed regulatory authority in the hands of an “unconstitutional regime” that puts local fisherman “at the mercy of unaccountable bureaucrats who answers only to themselves.”
The lawsuit specifically cites the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the primary law that governs marine fisheries management located within U.S. federal waters, with the plaintiffs calling it “Congress’s first comprehensive attempt to regulate fishing in federal waters.”
“In its zeal to regulate, however, Congress converted federal waters into Constitution-free zones, violating the Constitution in multiple respects – violations that are increasingly drawing judicial scrutiny,” the lawsuit says.
The case particularly involves the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council, which the plaintiffs say has been bestowed a “broad policymaking ‘authority over the fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico'” and eight Regional Fishery Management Councils at the center of the act that will invoke regulations and oversight on fisheries within their designated regions.
“Given this broad authority to set, monitor, adjust, and preserve federal policies … one would expect some degree of federal democratic control over the Councils,” the lawsuit reads. “But Congress provided just the opposite, immunizing Council Members from meaningful control by the President, his Commerce Secretary, and through them the American people.”
The lawsuit states that as a result of such power designation, state rather than federal officials were given the authority to designate council members, leaving fishermen’s fates in the hands of officials “insulated from democratic control and vulnerable to capture by narrow private interests.”
“More fundamentally, Congress broke the Constitution’s promise of separated powers and executive accountability to the President. This is clear in multiple respects,” the lawsuit reads.
The plaintiffs cited a Fifth Circuit ruling, which held that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) had violated fishermen’s Fourth Amendment rights after subjecting their boats to “round-the-clock GPS surveillance.”
The lawsuit also cited Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which fishermen are challenging the agency’s power under the act to “force government observers onto fishing boats while making fishermen fund that federal surveillance.”
The legal action comes on the heels of another lawsuit that involved a group of Maine lobstermen who beat the Biden administration in court last week.
The Maine Lobstermen’s Association sued the NMFS last year for its new rule that the government said was aimed at protecting the endangered North Atlantic right whale, but lobstermen said it threatened to put family-owned lobster fisheries out of business.
Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, who was part of the three-judge panel that decided the case, blasted the government’s theory in an opinion, writing that it “was not just wrong; it was egregiously wrong.”
