I n a new opinion, the United States Supreme Court ruled in favor of what most Americans have known for decades: Our government bureaucracy has grown too big and too powerful.
The ever-growing administrative state has distorted the executive branch’s power, in part by taking power from both Congress and the judicial branch. However, due to the Supreme Court’s decision in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, the Court has taken a powerful step in restoring equilibrium among the branches of government.
In Jarkesy, the Supreme Court found that the SEC unconstitutionally tried and punished someone against whom it accused of securities fraud, denying the defendant the right to have a jury trial before an impartial judge and jury. Put another way, what effectively amounts to an SEC employee — rather than an impartial adjudicator from the judicial branch — denied the defendant his day in court. This opinion will prevent this egregious ignorance of the Seventh Amendment from continuing, not only within the SEC, but throughout the government.
As many legal scholars have noted, the Jarkesy case is far from the only time bureaucrats have tried to evade the judicial branch entirely. This sideswiping of the separation of powers happens across our alphabet soup of government agencies.
Instead of going through the federal judicial process, agencies and departments often hire administrative law judges (ALJs) to hear cases. The problem is that these ALJs are employees of the agencies that hired them, and therefore they are also colleagues of the prosecutors in question. On the surface, the appearance of bias is evident, but the results are even more so. The Federal Trade Commission, for example, went a full quarter-century without losing a single ALJ-decided case.
This is arrogance, not justice. Fortunately, however, the highest court in the land — U.S. Constitution in hand — put its foot down.
First, after the SEC and FTC tried to block federal courts from ruling on the constitutionality of the structure of their agencies, SCOTUS ruled in 2023 that the agency’s “statutory review schemes” do not displace the Constitution or U.S. legal system. The court sided with a victim of this government overreach who, in a moving statement, exclaimed, “No one should ever face the prospect of a government that can demand to seize your most precious assets without the ability to defend yourself in a fair and impartial court of law.”
Once this SCOTUS opinion affirmed a defendant’s right to challenge the agencies in court, the government bureaucrats dropped their case, knowing full well they’d lose. Nevertheless, like every other government agency, from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to the Environmental Protection Agency, they have continued using their shadow courts, as if this judgment never came down.
And that’s where the recent decision comes into play.
In SEC v. Jarkesy, the Supreme Court didn’t just rule that the American people have a right to a trial by jury. It went so far as to affirm that the administrative state’s use of ALJs is largely unconstitutional.
Referencing the British usurpation of colonial America’s juries, the high court wrote that “the right to trial by jury is ‘of such importance and occupies so firm a place in our history and jurisprudence that any seeming curtailment of the right’ has always been and ‘should be scrutinized with the utmost care.’”
SCOTUS is right, and thanks to its decision, Americans will finally get their constitutional rights restored.
Critics of the opinion, including Justice Sotomayor, have called it “earth-shattering.” They are correct that this opinion will fundamentally alter how the government agencies conduct their business — but that is a good thing. For quite some time, the U.S. has needed a pivot back to constitutionally constrained governance. It will make us all better off.