News bits: Another monster at the USSC; Abortion cruelty in TX; Fun fact check; Fun headlines

The Atlantic writes about another monster lawsuit that would gut a major part of federal government power to regulate vast amounts of money and financial crime: 

The Case That Could Destroy the Government

What was once a fringe legal theory now stands a real chance of being adopted by the Supreme Court

This Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear a case that poses the most direct challenge yet to the legitimacy of the modern federal government. The right-wing legal movement’s target is the “administrative state”—the agencies and institutions that set standards for safety in the workplace, limit environmental hazards and damage, and impose rules on financial markets to ensure their stability and basic fairness, among many other important things. The case, Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, threatens all of that. Terrifyingly, this gambit might succeed.

The case involves garden-variety securities fraud. George R. Jarkesy Jr., a right-wing activist and conservative-radio talk-show host, ran a pair of investment funds with $24 million in assets. But he misrepresented how the funds were run, paid himself and his partner exorbitant fees, and inflated the assets’ value. As punishment, the SEC fined him several hundred thousand dollars and prohibited him from working in some parts of the securities industry—very standard stuff.

Jarkesy responded with what can be described only as chutzpah. He didn’t just contest the SEC’s ruling; he alleged that the SEC’s entire process against him was unconstitutional. Among other things, he asserted that Congress never had the authority to empower the SEC and that the SEC adjudicator who punished him was too independent from presidential control.

In May of last year, Jarkesy’s arguments were accepted by two judges on the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In a 2–1 decision, the court agreed with Jarkesy, all but ruling the SEC’s entire existence unconstitutional. The opinion was so extreme that Judge W. Eugene Davis, twice appointed by Republican presidents—and elevated to the appeals court by Ronald Reagan—dissented vigorously.

Jarkesy’s most far-reaching constitutional argument is built on the “nondelegation doctrine,” which holds that there may be some limits on the kinds of powers that Congress can give to agencies. Jarkesy argues that, when Congress gave the SEC the power to decide whether to bring enforcement actions in court or in front of an independent agency adjudicator, it gave away a core legislative function. It thus violated the doctrine and engaged in an unconstitutional delegation.

This is wild stuff. Not long ago, a lawyer would have been laughed out of court for making such nondelegation claims. Today, they’d have a good chance of destroying the federal government’s administrative capacity—taking down its ability to protect Americans’ health and safety while unleashing fraud in the financial markets.

Whether Congress’s grant of authority to the SEC was constitutional should not be a close question. Congress has delegated expansive authority to government agencies since the dawn of the republic. Only twice in American history has the Supreme Court concluded that a delegation to an agency ran afoul of the Constitution—and both of those times, nearly 90 years ago, involved unusual statutes nothing like this one.  

The SEC was created as an independent agency in 1934, after the financial crash of 1929, to thwart the sort of market manipulation that preceded the Great Depression; Congress has granted it additional powers over the years to continue protecting financial markets. Responding to catastrophes and guarding against market manipulation is exactly the kind of work that Congress should empower the executive branch to do. Requiring Congress to legislate in response to every new fraud some crook might dream up would not be a good use of its time. And there’s no reason to think that delegating authority to police markets runs afoul of the Constitution. 

Notice how the radicalized autocratic, plutocratic, theocratic USSC can take down democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. It just does it slowly, one case at a time, as quietly as possible. Power and wealth flow to wealthy elites and big corporations from government and individual citizens.

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From the Don't Blame the Cruel Anti-Abortionists Files: The Hill reports that the Texas state attorney is arguing in court that women who have been denied medical treatments for problem pregnancies should sue the doctors, not the state of TX.  

Lawyers in the Texas attorney general’s office said Tuesday that women should sue their doctors, not the state, over a lack of access to abortion in defending the state’s strict law.

Beth Klusmann of the Texas Attorney General’s Office made that point in oral arguments before the state Supreme Court in a case challenging Texas’s abortion ban, which bars doctors from providing abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected — typically around six weeks into pregnancy — with exceptions only for cases in which the life of the mother is at risk.

“If a woman is bleeding, if she has amniotic fluid running down her legs — then the problem is not with the law,” Klusmann said. “It is with the doctors.”

Klusmann was responding to plaintiffs in the case, who had charged the legislation had plunged the state into a “health care crisis.”

The lawsuit in Zurawski v. Texas was brought by 22 women who said that state law had forced them to carry nonviable and dangerous pregnancies to term — in other words, to go through the ordeal of pregnancy with a fetus that would not survive, and that in many cases was putting them at serious risk.

The arrogance and callousness of the monsters that run the state of TX is breathtaking. First, TX legislators write sloppy, ambiguous laws that incentivized people to report doctors and health care providers for violating their crappy laws. Then, they tell women caught in the crossfire to sue the doctors.

TX sounds like a hell hole for women and other hated groups, but lots of people love the place, including lots of women and people in targeted groups. 

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To lighten things up here’s a fun history bit & fact check. The asserted history fact:

Here’s the PolitiFact verdict:

• Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s assertion is undercut by two centuries of U.S. history, including land gains following wars against Mexico, Spain, Filipino rebels, Japan and Native American tribes.

• United States-Mexico war, 1848: Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico ceded 55% of its territory, including the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming.

McCarthy, dressed in formal attire, embarrassed himself when he make his false assertion on November 26, 2023 in a speech at the Oxford Union. The Oxford Union is the 200-year-old debating society at the University of Oxford in England.

Those Republican elites. They’re just so full of . . . . . . MAGA!!

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“Epic humiliation”: GOP mocked for rejecting Hunter Biden offer to testify publicly --
“What the Republicans fear most is sunlight and the truth,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin

AOC Says Republicans Would Be “Humiliated” If Hunter Biden Hearing Was Public -- Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Republicans are afraid that the public will see that they have no case

It’s Official: Mike Johnson Is Even Less Competent Than Kevin McCarthy Was -- We’re now barreling toward a government shutdown and the House of Representatives is completely paralyzed.

U.S. GDP grew at a 5.2% rate in the third quarter, even stronger than first indicated (Darn Biden and his rotten economy /s)

A Texas Woman Goes Before School Board To Announce Porn Addiction Claim. She Blames the Scholastic Book Fair -- It turns out the woman may work for a conservative publishing company trying to take down Scholastic (Darned scholastic porn books /s)

Republicans Trip Over Their Own Assholes Trying to Take Down Hunter Biden 😮

Sarah Huckabee Sanders 🤪 appoints anti-LGBTQ+ Christian nationalist to oversee state libraries -- Jason Rapert recently called LGBTQ+ people a cult and a "devil of Hell."

Ah Sarah, what a patriot, full of charm and grace.

So, what did he say?

Oh, that’s what he said