United States – January 30: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts listens to President Donald Trump’s speech … [+]
Just in time for America’s 248th anniversaryNumber On Chief Justice John Roberts’ birthday, our nation received two landmark decisions that overturned unjust executive power and turned the tide for freedom. These decisions represent the Court’s greatest contribution to saving Americans from the clutches of bureaucratic masterminds in at least half a century. Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkeshi and Roper Bright vs. Raimondo (Decided in parallel with the NCLA lawsuit) Relentless v. Department of Commerce) didn’t just right two wrongs, they delivered a one-two punch toward independence. Each case, in its own way, changed the direction our ship of state was heading, setting it back on a course far more compatible with individual liberty and self-government than the tyrannical trajectory the Court had veered from a century ago. Together, they established the Chief Justice’s legacy as a staunch defender of structural Constitutional law and a fervent foe of illegitimate executive power.
A closer look at these two decisions reveals how groundbreaking they are. Chief Justice Roberts wrote: Jahkesy The right to a jury trial, they argued, was protected in the Constitution (in several places) precisely because colonists had personally experienced a monarch trying them for misconduct in a juryless court under royal control. So when Congress set aside the federal judiciary and began allowing federal agencies to pursue rule-breakers in their own courts, it felt familiar, if foreboding. The infringements of individual rights under this regime were both predictable and pernicious.
For the SEC, the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act dramatically increased the agency’s ability to hold regulated entities before biased internal adjudicators. But whatever the source of the legislative malice, sometimes it doesn’t exist.for exampleAlthough some of the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs’ awards are based solely on Presidential Orders, when government agencies act as prosecutor, judge, and jury, they invariably abuse the combination of powers that the Founding Fathers worked so hard to keep separate: filing litigation that is nuanced in fact, law, or both; pressuring parties to settle rather than contest their innocence; charging exorbitant fees, intimidating witnesses, and failing to produce exculpatory evidence; and, perhaps most egregiously, even “administrative deficiencies” that have prosecutorial staff downloading computer files from the adjudicating side of government agencies, in part because the SEC is working so hard to hide this highly unethical conduct. All of these pathologies of administrative adjudication, and at least 20 others, would be far less prevalent, and some would all but disappear, if the right to a jury trial in an actual Article III court were restored.
Note that the right of appeal to the Article III Circuit, which has always been possible, at least in theory, is not enough. At the time of appeal, the overwhelming majority of parties have already been forced to settle (98% at the SEC). For those that do not settle, an administrative record is set. At the appellate court level, there are no juries to inquire into the facts; therefore, only errors of law can be corrected. But every little bit of prevention of a jury trial up front can prevent a pound of factual issues that cannot be resolved later on appeal.
The critics Jahkesy The judgment complains that having administrative agencies take enforcement actions in real courts limits their ability to pursue criminals harshly. Indeed, holding real trials requires more resources than a fake in-house court, so to the extent that resources limit the enforcement actions an administrative agency can take, it must mobilize those resources to go after the most deserving targets now. But since when did respect for constitutional rights such as jury trial and due process become an unwelcome obstacle to increasing government control over the lives of Americans? And what happened to the principle of being presumed innocent until proven guilty? Are administrative statists, intoxicated with power or obsessed with statism, assuming that all targets of administrative enforcement are well selected (guilty) and that the efficiency gains of hastening judgment outweigh the loss of deliberation through jury trials?
Some biased journalists have accused big business of being behind the movement to restore the right to a jury trial, as if respect for the Bill of Rights was a reason to look for questionable motives. In reality, George Jerkies and his courageous legal team have been engaged in a mostly solitary movement to fix multiple constitutional flaws through administrative tribunals. His obsession with the right to a jury trial can be explained by the simple fact that those who are so-called cornered are motivated to test unsuccessful arguments and to fight back so hard that they expose the cracks in what others mistakenly see as a solid facade. Most voices on the appellate bar ridiculed Jerkies’s legal team for attempting this argument. Even after his success in the Fifth Circuit, most of the Supreme Court bar remained skeptical about Jerkies’ chances of winning this argument on appeal.
Jerkiesy not only won a case, but a victory that will reverberate to the furthest reaches of the executive coastline. The Chief Justice’s opinion for the Supreme Court holds that the SEC must respect the right to a jury trial in fraud cases, a type of liability that has a familiar common law counterpart. But the opinion is broad enough to encompass not just the SEC but at least every federal agency that seeks to impose punitive monetary penalties. The opinion candidly points out that the Seventh Amendment extends to: all It covers all cases except admiralty and equity cases, which the Constitution excludes. It also focuses the attention of lower courts on the relief the government is seeking in the case. When monetary penalties are imposed for punitive or deterrent reasons, a jury trial is almost always required.
The public’s exception to the right to a jury trial is narrowed
To the dissent’s chagrin, the Supreme Court’s opinions also challenged and ultimately invalidated many of the so-called Article III public right exceptions to jurisdiction that the Supreme Court had long used to justify denying jury trial when Congress delegated the power to enforce new laws to the executive branch. Atlas Roofing Co. v. Occupational Safety and Health Review Board The Seventh Amendment, it held, does not require a jury trial in administrative proceedings to enforce civil violations of federal “public rights” laws. Worse, the scope of public rights was broadly defined to include “cases in which the Government may sue in a sovereign capacity to enforce public rights created by laws enacted within the legislative power of Congress.” This meant that, if Congress so chose, almost any statutory prohibition could be enforced by civil penalties without a jury trial.
In discarding this vague principle, the Chief Justice put on notice that the government cannot turn the right to a jury trial into an option that can only be exercised at the government’s discretion. Congress has no power to abolish the right to a jury trial; that is, not only cannot government agencies do so on their own, but cannot do so even with the express authorization of Congress. In fact, Americans’ right to a jury trial is paramount in lawsuits against the government, and the notion that the right to a jury trial is limited to tort, contract, and other lawsuits against private parties is false. This historically learned and deeply ingrained decision seems destined to forever protect Americans’ right to a jury trial from infringement by the administrative state.
In practical terms, that would mean pushing many cases back into Article III courts, where they belong. In other wordsnot before an administrative law judge. This may require appointing a few more Article III judges, even if agencies do not file the same amount of cases as before. If so, that seems like a small price taxpayers would have to pay in exchange for restoring the right to a jury trial as a bulwark against aggressive agency enforcement tactics.
[NB: Chief Justice Roberts did not stop there. Stay tuned for the second half of the analysis, covering the Loper Bright and Relentless cases.]
