Reading this reminded me of my time on the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council.  Although the Mid-Atlantic Council has arguably done a much better job rebuilding and conserving fish stocks than the New England Council has, the same themes were there:  The fishermen, for-hire boat owners, etc. who claim that the next round of regulations were going to put them out of business, just as they had said about the last rule, and the one before that, and the one before...  And the folks around the table (thankfully, far from all of them) who seemingly forgot their oath, and argued for nothing but the short-term interests of their industry, even if what they wanted to do clearly violated the law, the overall best interests of the country and thus, of necessity, their sworn word.  Even worse were the lowlifes in the audience and elsewhere who expected Council members to violate their oaths in order to support some pet agenda, and those who castigated Council members (I was certainly one of their targets) who upheld the law, and the spirit and letter of their oath, rather than yielding to the not-very-veiled threats coming from industry spokesmen.
I think of how much worse it would have been, and how much worse it would be now, had the Sustainable Fisheries Act of 1996 not limited councilmembers ability to act solely in their own short-term interests, and how important it is to defend the conservation measures included in that bill from industry efforts to water them down.