The Supreme Court Just Lit a Match And Tossed It Into Dozens of Federal Agencies
27th June 2024
Good news, for a change, even if Voice of the Crust VOX doesn’t think so.
On Thursday, the Court handed down a 6-3 decision, on a party-line vote, that could render a simply astonishing array of federal laws unenforceable. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor writes in dissent, “the constitutionality of hundreds of statutes may now be in peril, and dozens of agencies could be stripped of their power to enforce laws enacted by Congress.”
The dispute in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy turns on whether a hedge fund manager accused of defrauding investors is entitled to a jury trial to determine whether he violated federal securities law, or whether the government acted properly when it tried him before an official known as an “administrative law judge” (ALJ).
The charges against this hedge fund manager, George Jarkesy, are civil and not criminal, which matters because the Constitution treats civil trials very differently from criminal proceedings. While the Sixth Amendment provides that “in all criminal prosecutions” the defendant is entitled to a jury trial, the Seventh Amendment provides a more limited jury trial right, requiring them “in suits at common law” (more on what that means later).
Needless to say, the Deep State would prefer to keep such persecutions prosecutions in front of their tame apparatchiks. (An ‘administrative law judge’ isn’t a Real Judge in the sense used in the Constitution, they’re just called that to make them seem spiffier.)