A decision from the Supreme Court’s conservative majority to severely rein in the ability of federal agencies to go after lawbreakers amounts to a “power grab” that strips authority away from Congress, according to liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
“Congress had no reason to anticipate the chaos today’s majority would unleash after all these years,” she wrote in her dissent in a ruling that diminishes the Securities and Exchange Commission’s power to enforce laws against securities fraud.
Thursday’s decision is another blow to federal agencies from the conservative majority, which decided that agency-led authorities violate offenders’ right to a trial by jury.
“Beyond the majority’s legal errors, its ruling reveals a far more fundamental problem: This Court’s repeated failure to appreciate that its decisions can threaten the separation of powers,” Sotomayor wrote in her lengthy dissent, which she also read aloud from the bench.
“Here, that threat comes from the Court’s mistaken conclusion that Congress cannot assign a certain public-rights matter for initial adjudication to the Executive because it must come only to the Judiciary,” she wrote.
“Make no mistake,” she added. “Today’s decision is a power grab.”
Critics have long warned against a tide of legal threats from right-wing legal groups and business interests challenging enforcement powers from federal agencies, with litigation making their way to the Supreme Court’s sympathetic conservative majority.
The court’s conservatives telegraphed their ruling during November’s oral arguments in the case of Securities and Exchange Commission v Jarkesy, which asks whether agency-led tribunals violate the Seventh Amendment’s right to a jury trial.
The majority’s decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts threatens to derail how any regulatory agency — including the Federal Communications Commission and agencies protecting labor rights — will be able to enforce their authorities.
Congress would have to spend an unrealistic tens of billions of dollars to boost capacity and personnel for those agencies to be able to handle jury trials.
“The majority today upends longstanding precedent and the established practice of its coequal partners in our tripartite system of Government,” Sotomayor wrote. “Because the Court fails to act as a neutral umpire when it rewrites established rules in the manner it does today, I respectfully dissent.”
The case involved a challenge from hedge fund manager George Jarkesy, whose firm was ordered to pay a $300,000 penalty for misstatements and other violations in his communications with investors. The firm was also ordered to return nearly $685,000 for “illicit gains.”
His challenge — backed by Elon Musk and Mark Cuban, among others — landed at the conservative-dominated Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has operated as a pipeline for right wing-backed legal challenges that reach the nation’s highest court.
