The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) overstepped its authority with a plan for lobstermen to reduce the lines they place in the water by 98 percent within 10 years.
“It’s a huge win,” eighth-generation lobsterman Jason Joyce of Swans Island, Maine, told The Epoch Times.
The lobstermen said the policy plan set an unrealistic standard. In addition, they say there is no reliable data that Maine lobstermen are hurting whales.
Maine Lobstermen’s Association (MLA) policy director Patrice McCarron echoed Joyce’s sentiments in a June 16 press release, the day the decision was issued.
“MLA is grateful for the panel’s thorough and unanimous opinion that exposes the flaws in the biological opinion that lobstermen have been emphasizing from the beginning,” the statement reads.
Appeals Court Judge Douglas Ginsburg, writing for the three-judge panel, said the NMFS’S “legal reasoning was not just wrong; it was egregiously wrong.”
According to the decision, the NMFS used “legislative history” to determine Congress’ intent when it applied the Endangered Species Act. Ginsburg wrote that the NMFS must use the existing law to determine Congress’ intent.
“We cannot approve such a casual disregard of the rules of statutory interpretation. The reason is obvious; as any high school Civics student should know, legislators vote on, and the president signs bills, not their legislative history,” Ginsburg wrote.
McCarron wrote that the MLA would not rest.
“While today’s decision is great news, our work will continue.”
In September 2021, the MLA, the Maine Department of Marine Resources, and others sued the NMFS over rules designed to protect the North Atlantic right whale. MLA claimed that NMFS extrapolated data from 2017, when 17 North Atlantic right whales died. The NMFS reportedly estimated the whale population and other data based on “worst-case scenarios.” The lobstermen said the data were skewed against them.
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