This SCOTUS case could 'hobble a whole range' of federal government agencies

Created in 1934 during the Great Depression, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was among the many achievements of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. The SEC has been a prime target of the right-wing legal movement, and the SEC's regulatory powers are being challenged in the U.S. Supreme Court case SEC v. Jarkesy.

But Politico reporters Declan Harty, Josh Sisco and Josh Gerstein, in an article published on May 22, stress that the case has implications that go way beyond the SEC and could, depending on what the High Court ultimately rules, affect other federal regulatory agencies as well.

"A decade-long conservative crusade against financial regulators will come to a head soon with a crucial Supreme Court ruling, part of a legal strategy that has spread across multiple Washington agencies into a broad attack on a core power of the federal government," the journalists explain. "The Court's ruling on Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, a case challenging the power of in-house federal judges, could hobble a whole range of agencies in unpredictable ways, cutting the powers of antitrust enforcers, labor regulators and consumer finance watchdogs."

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The "legal campaign" surrounding SEC v. Jarkesy, according to Harty, Sisco and Gerstein, is being "driven by an alliance of tech billionaires, conservative legal activists and the business lobby."

"Jarkesy itself is a challenge to the legal legitimacy of the SEC's internal system of judges and courts, which hear cases and impose fines," the reporters note. "Such internal courts are key to enforcement at many federal agencies."

Todd Phillips of the liberal Roosevelt Institute told Politico that the SEC's critics in Jarkesy are "really just trying to get the Supreme Court to tear down the regulatory system that's been in place since before the New Deal."

Harty, Sisco and Gerstein note, "The Jarkesy case itself revolves around a hedge-fund manager, George Jarkesy, also a conservative TV and radio commentator, who was fined for defrauding investors and then sued over the validity of the tribunal that did it. Supporters of the process say there's a good reason to empower such internal courts, especially in complex issues like securities fraud and labor relations."

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Read Politico's full report at this link.