A court struck down a fishery council's power. Alaska's council has the same one.

A federal appeals court has ruled that a Gulf of Mexico fishery council holds an unconstitutional power over federal fishing rules — and Alaska's own fishery council holds the exact same power. That power is the machinery behind some of the most consequential fishing programs in the state, including the one that sends a share of Bering Sea quota to 65 Western Alaska villages.

For now, nothing changes in Alaska. Thursday's decision came from the Eleventh Circuit, which covers the Gulf states; Alaska sits in the Ninth Circuit, which hasn't taken up the question. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council's authority is intact unless the Ninth Circuit or the U.S. Supreme Court weighs in. But four appeals courts have now looked at this, most of them reaching the same conclusion — and the issue is clearly moving through the courts toward an answer that could eventually reach Alaska.

Here is what's at stake. The councils that manage federal fisheries include state officials and other members the Commerce Secretary doesn't appoint. The court found it unconstitutional for those members to hold a veto — the power to block the Secretary from taking certain actions — because people who aren't appointed and accountable to the President shouldn't be able to override a federal official. Alaska's council has the same makeup: of its 11 voting members, four are seated outside the Secretary's appointment process, and they share in the same veto power the court just rejected in the Gulf.

The specific power in question is narrow but important: a council's ability to stop the Secretary from imposing a "limited access" system — a program that caps who can fish a stock, through permits or quota shares. That is not the power to propose such a program, which is how Alaska's biggest fishing regimes were built. Crab rationalization, the American Fisheries Act pollock cooperatives, the halibut and sablefish quota program, and the Community Development Quota program all came from council recommendations the Secretary approved. The CDQ program alone hands a slice of Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands quota to 65 Western Alaska communities, organized into six groups — a cornerstone of the rural coastal economy.

The case itself was brought by Gulf commercial fishermen fighting an 86 percent cut to gag grouper catch limits. They won the constitutional argument but lost the case: the court found the veto power had nothing to do with the grouper rule and left the rule standing. Its narrowest fix was simply to ignore any council action taken under the veto provisions, rather than rewrite the law.

Alaska's fingerprints are already on this area of law. In finding the Gulf council's structure unconstitutional, the Eleventh Circuit leaned in part on a 1987 Ninth Circuit case out of Alaska. No Alaska party took part in Thursday's case, and the North Pacific council has taken no position — but the question of whether its long-standing powers survive is now one good appeal away from its own courthouse.