Title: Chevron and the Mountain of Fishhooks
Original CoS Document (slug): chevron-and-the-mountain-of-fishhooks
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Created: 2023-05-18 12:45:50
Updated: 2023-05-25 03:00:01
Published: 2023-05-18 00:00:00
Converted: 2025-04-14T21:24:48.416193702
Chevron has been in the political news this month leaving some people wondering, why are we talking about a fabric pattern?
The buzz was prompted by the Supreme Court deciding to take the case, //Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo//, that directly challenges //Chevron deference//. In cases of a dispute against a regulation, Chevron allows the courts to defer to the expertise of the relevant administrative agency when the law is unclear.
The petition alone says a lot about government overreach. The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has required commercial fishing boats to accommodate onboard NMFS observers. A new rule in New England now requires businesses to pay the salaries of federal observers. For Loper Bright, that’s 20% of their annual revenue.
Diving a bit deeper, we see the tangled mess of our administrative state. It’s like looking up at a mountain of fishhooks.
NMFS, now called NOAA Fisheries, has a $1.2 billion annual budget and operates by 24 legislative enactments spanning over 100 years. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was formed in 1970 by executive order as an umbrella agency and placed the NOAA in the Department of Commerce.
No act of Congress created the NOAA – it’s a conglomeration. NOAA has an annual budget of $6.8 billion, citing nearly 70 US codes, and operates by a list of legislative acts too long to count. Its current strategic priorities are the climate crisis, promoting equity, and the New Blue Economy.
The NOAA is one of 18 different bureaus and offices within the Department of Commerce, all with layers of sub-sectors and offices with hundreds of associated laws and thousands of US Codes. It’s so complex, so entangled, that proper oversight and accountability to taxpayers are nearly impossible to achieve.
The SCOTUS case tugs on one fishhook from one mountain of fishhooks that stands among a vast range of fishhook mountains. This is our administrative state; and the Washington, D.C. machine keeps making more fishhooks.
So what can we do?
Big problems need big solutions. We can begin untangling the administrative state and put the fishhook factory out of business. We the People have the power written into Article V of the Constitution.
It’s called Convention of States. We can impose fiscal restraints on the federal government, limit its power and jurisdiction, and impose term limits on its officials and members of Congress.
We decide. See the plan and sign on to Convention of States.