NOAA has the authority to increase catch limits in response to an emergency, according to the Congressional Research Service.
That’s because the Magnuson-Stevens Act, for all it does define, never gets around to defining what constitutes an emergency.
U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) raised the issue with the CRS, which was chartered almost a century ago to provide research and analysis to lawmakers and their staffs.
The exchange came to our attention via a Web posting by the New Bedford, Mass.-based Project to Save Seafood and Ocean Resources.
“It appears possible,” the CRS said, “that action taken by the Secretary in response to an economic ‘emergency’ could likely withstand judicial review, so long as the Secretary’s determination that the conditions in question constituted an 'emergency' was a reasonable one.”
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