Two fishermen slapped the Biden administration in the United States 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.”