The Supreme Court Neuters a Vital Public Watchdog.
'The Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority talks a lot about the importance of history and tradition in deciding cases. And yet as those six justices made clear once again on Thursday morning in one of the biggest cases of the current term, only certain histories and certain traditions matter.
The decision, in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, struck down the S.E.C.’s use of in-house judges to bring enforcement actions against securities fraud. The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial in civil cases, the majority wrote, which means arrangements like the S.E.C.’s — which Congress explicitly created and which are also used by roughly two dozen other agencies — are unconstitutional. If the agency wants to go after securities fraud, it will have to go to federal court.
The problem with this neat-sounding conclusion is that it ignores two centuries of well-established practice to the contrary. When a lawsuit involves the protection of rights of the public generally, juries have never been required. As the Supreme Court affirmed in a 1977 case, Congress’s power to give executive-branch agencies the first stab at adjudicating and imposing civil penalties has been “settled judicial construction … from the beginning.”
Thursday’s ruling is thus “a seismic shift in this court’s jurisprudence,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Its impact will reach far beyond securities fraud, hamstringing similar tribunals in agencies responsible for the environment, public health, food and consumer safety, worker protections and much more. . .
What the majority refuses to acknowledge is that there is no way the federal courts can handle the volume and sophistication of cases that pass through those agencies. ((Which is WHY such agencies were established to begin with.))
The irony is that earlier right-wing justices understood that a modern, highly advanced society cannot operate without robust executive agencies. In 1989, Justice Antonin Scalia spoke out in defense of another longstanding administrative-state precedent that the Roberts court appears to be on the verge of crippling, saying it “accurately reflects the reality of government” and “adequately serves its needs.”>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/opinion/court-sec-administrative-state.html
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