these two cases before the supremes could easily return us to a more representative form of government and reduce the level of repression we sometimes face, indirectly;

Are we truly a nation of, by, and for the people, as Lincoln put it, if our elected representatives aren’t the ones actually making the decisions affecting our lives? For a long time they haven’t been making many of those decisions, too, having essentially “outsourced” them to judges and bureaucrats. But two cases currently before the Supreme Court could help remedy this problem and force Congress to do its job — and could restore power to the people.

The two cases are Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Commerce. And what instigated them well illustrates the perils of letting unelected officials, whose unelected status places them beyond the people’s corrective reach, issue life-altering regulations.

“For the past 30 years, the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA) has given the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the authority to require monitors on commercial fishing boats,” writes LoperBrightCase.com. “These monitors are intended to ensure that the fishermen adhere to ethical fishing practices, as mandated by NOAA.”

But here’s the kicker: Outrageously, the MSA mandates that certain types of fishing vessels must pay for these federally required monitors themselves. Nonetheless, the act didn’t list herring boats as among those types, and for many years the NOAA agreed that it didn’t apply to these boats and funded the monitors itself.

That is, until the agency ran out of money.

Then, instead of getting more congressional funding, the NOAA simply changed its interpretation of the MSA and voila! Now these herring fisherman, who have a crew of only five or six on their vessels, have to pay the monitors’ salary — which reportedly runs more than $700 a day per boat.

This “can be as much as 20% of a ship’s daily take home pay and is frequently more than the ships’ captains make,” LoperBrightCase.com informs. (Why a fed whose only role is to sit around and watch people makes $700 a day is another matter. Sounds like a scam. But that’s government for you.)

Earth-shaking Implications........more........