Insisted in-house judicial proceedings where agency prosecutes and judges are ‘efficient’
By Bob Unruh
It was unsuccessful, but the leftists on the U.S. Supreme Court recently assembled a strategy that would have canceled the constitutional right to a jury trial for multitudes of Americans in civil fights.
That would be any person who is accused of something by a federal agency, then brought to “trial” by that agency before one of the agency’s own “judges,” dispensing with the need for a jury.
The threat to the Constitution was profiled by Anastasia Boden in a report at Scotusblog.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Jackson had claimed there would be “chaos” if the majority, as it did, provided a real trial with a real jury for a dispute involving a man and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
They accused the majority in the case involving George Jarkesy of taking “a wrecking ball to… settled law and stable government practice.”
They claimed that letting agencies hear evidence and decide penalties on their own, without the ordinary rules of court procedure or a jury, was “so settled that it bec[ame] an undisputable reality of how ‘our Government has actually worked.'”