December 10, 2022 — The following is an excerpt from an opinion piece published in National Review by Stefan Axelsson. Stefan is a third-generation fisherman from Cape May, New Jersey, and is the captain of the fishing vessel Dyrsten.
If you’re a good driver, you follow the rules of the road, obeying the speed limit, coming to full stops at stop signs, and yielding to pedestrians in crosswalks. And that ought to be enough. But now imagine that the government mandated you carry a state trooper in your passenger seat, one assigned to ensure you obey every traffic law at all times — and one whose salary you were obligated to pay out of your own pocket.
Sound far-fetched? It’s not. Something similar is happening to me today.
I make my living fishing out of Cape May, N.J. While I don’t have a state trooper riding in my car, the federal government makes me carry a monitor on my vessel to observe my activities and report back to the government.
And yes, the government wants to force me to pay the monitor directly — at least when I fish for herring — at a cost of more than $700 a day. That comes on top of an obligation to provide the monitor with a bunk and meals during what can be days-long outings. At times, the monitor is the highest-paid person on the boat, outearning both the captain and the crew.
Federal law gives NOAA the power to force me to carry a monitor on my boat, but it doesn’t give the agency the power to make me pay for the monitor. If Congress had passed a law that allowed NOAA to force herring fishermen to pay for monitors, we could at least use our voices and our votes to check the lawmakers who’d voted for it. But since in this instance a federal agency has tried to do the same thing through an unconstitutional, unilateral power grab, we’ve been forced to settle the issue in the courts.
Our case seemed like a slam dunk to me until I learned about “Chevron deference,” a legal doctrine established in a 1984 Supreme Court decision that effectively requires judges to cede their authority to interpret the law to federal bureaucrats. Judges are supposed to be a check on executive-branch abuses, but Chevron deference turns that upside down and transforms judges into rubber stamps for the whims of the federal bureaucracy.
Read the full opinion piece at National Review
An additional editorial on the issue was recently published by the Washington Times. Read the editorial here.