Is The Supreme Court Finally Cutting Through Washington’s Red Tape?
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What we have coming in front of the Supreme Court is, could do more to drain the proverbial swamp than anything that I have seen in a very long period of time. The Supreme Court is gonna consider right now, there’s a case, it’s the Securities and Exchange Commission versus Jarkesy. And again, it basically is going to go after
the administrative state. Now over the past several decades, Congress has, and we’ve made fun of this here on the show, has basically said, hey, you know, that whole legal, that whole law writing business, we’d much rather be rubbing elbows with lobbyists and raising money. That’s what we really like to do. We don’t like doing this whole legal thing, this, you know, I’m just a bill, just an ordinary bill. No, they don’t do that anymore.
So they have said, they punted. They’ve said, you know what, we’re going to delegate our congressional authority, what we’re supposed to do, our jobs, to all of these administrative agencies, all the acronym agencies out there. Securities and Exchange Commission has gotten all sorts of power after Dodd-Frank to basically seek penalties administratively against any individually.
individual for violating securities laws. And again, the left, they’re very keen on this. They really like expanding the administrative state. We talk about it here in terms of the government being judge, jury, and executioner. And that’s what all of these acronym agencies are. And we’ve covered here over the years, a myriad of examples of overreach by the administrative state.
For the SEC, for example, their tribunals let the SEC prosecutors present hearsay evidence and unauthenticated documents that would be completely inadmissible in a traditional federal court. Defendants also enjoy fewer procedural protections, including the tools of legal discovery. Guess what their winning rate is? The SEC.
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Yeah, 100%. 100% in-house victory rate versus 61% in federal court. Now this Jarkisi fella, he was charged with securities fraud for allegedly inflating the value of his hedge funds assets. Again, the agency said he was doing this so he could earn higher management fees.
An administrative law judge ruled against Jarkeese. The commissioners upheld the ruling six years later and ordered him to pay a $300,000 penalty and barred him from the industry. He appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals arguing that the SEC tribunals violate his Seventh Amendment right to trial by jury. He also contended that multiple layers of four-cause tenure protections for these administrative law.
Judges from presidential removal offend the constitutional separation of powers. And the Fifth Circuit ruled in his favor. And again, this is heading to the Supreme Court at this point in time. And this would be, this would rip apart the administrative state. Now, the left is coming out on this and saying, you know, how in the world, if you do this,
All these Wall Street crooks are going to run rough shot over the country and all of these terrible things are going to happen. And what about environmental protections and the FDA and all of these things that they’re going to bring out? You know, again, lions and tigers and bears and the sky is going to fall and the world is going to end. Now, listen, I understand. I understand that the court system is bogged down. It’s a mess. Now, do I think that?
Any of this stuff would actually apply to immigration cases? No, no, that’s something else entirely. But do I believe that one deserves to have a trial by jury? Absolutely. Now we have this thing that’s supposed to be a jury of your peers. Now, I would tilt towards, again, and I’ve mentioned this before, and when it comes to our legal system here in the United States, it’s dumb.
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sorry. I mean, we love patting ourselves on the back, telling ourselves how great we are at everything we do here in this country. Our legal system is right now it’s absurd. If you actually think about it, first and foremost, you know, talking about regards to ridiculous lawsuits being filed by all of the ambulance chasers out there. Quite frankly, I like I like what the Brits have installed loser pays. So if you’re going to go after somebody some frivolous lawsuit and you lose
Guess what? You’re going to pay the legal fees like that. Now, jury by your peers. That’s what we were taught way back when, civics class. You ever look up what the word peers actually means? OK, in essence, it’s a person of the same age, status, or ability as another person. Now, I have no problem. I’ve talked about this before. You want to speed up the court process. You want to do away with a lot of the nonsense. You want to cut costs.
What you need to do is you need to have professional jurors. You need to have professional jurors. For example, I mean, they do this all the time. They bring expert witnesses in, like the defense will bring in an expert witness. The prosecution will bring in an expert witness. There’s a great scene there, which I love one fantastic movie. My cousin Vinnie, where the prosecutor brought in the expert from the FBI.
And as it turned out, he didn’t know nearly as much as Marissa Tomei did about cars. Let’s just leave it at that. You gotta go watch the scene to truly appreciate it. I’m not gonna do it justice by even trying to reenact it. But anyway, neither here nor there. If you had a system set in a place where we go through this, you know, I’ve got jury duty things. Okay, I get it when it comes to certain types of criminal,
cases, cut and dry type things. I understand that. But when you’re going to get into, let’s say, a complicated case like this one, like this one, wouldn’t it be better to have a pool of people that actually understand Wall Street and valuations and a myriad of different things where you pick from a pool of people that you could call on to serve as jurors in this, where you could cut through a lot of the BS.
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And a lot of the time, you save the court a ton of time trying to explain all of the intricacies of Wall Street, how these valuations are put into place in regards to funds. You do away with all that by putting people in place and you could speed up the process. And again, obviously, you have to compensate these people for their time. You know, for example, you know, you have people that understand, you know, for the SEC cases or Wall Street type case, people that actually understand it. If it was a medical.
type of a case. And then you’d have people that were experts in that, that you could call upon to act as professional jurors. And it would speed up the damn process for crying out loud. You’d have a pool of people that you could call on that would be for that specific industry. So if the FDA wanted to have their, well, pool of jurors, fine. But at least you are getting a trial by jury. You’re not getting a trial by tribunal.
Again, it’s certain common sense type of things that we could do to fix all of this. Is it going to be some anarchy if they tear down the administrative state? Yes, it will. But, you know, sometimes, you know what, you know, you got to break a few eggs to make a cake and sometimes you got to start from square one and start over. Because obviously this system is not working.
It’s not working, it’s not fair, and quite frankly, I do believe it’s, you know, even though it’s easier for Congress, and it’s easier for the administrative state, and then it’s easier for politicians, because again, the administrative state is a part of the executive branch of government. Don’t say that they can’t push undue influence on the administrative state. They can, not to mention the fact that these people are end up being lifers there. And that’s problematic in of itself.
So again, rather than having full-time employees that are working on these tribunals, again, you go to your peers depending on what it may be. If it has something to do with mining, you have experts in that industry on both sides that you can pull into that jury pool to weigh on rather than wasting the taxpayers’ money and also breaking people’s constitutional rights. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.