SCOTUS meant business
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The Supreme Court's end-of-term bombshell drop continued today with three business-related decisions.
Why it matters: The cases decided today are of the sort less likely to cause disruption in, say, an upcoming presidential debate. But they're important.
💊 In perhaps the day's biggest headline grabber, the court blocked a national settlement crafted in bankruptcy court that would've ended claims against disgraced opioid maker Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family, owners of the OxyContin maker.
- The 5-4 decision did not fall along any kind of discernible ideological lines. Biden-appointee Ketanji Brown Jackson joined some of the conservatives — Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas — in the majority.
- It's a reflection of the tortured complexity of the case, a "study in unsavory trade-offs."
👩⚖️ Next, in a 6-3 decision along party lines, the court weakened the SEC's power to use its in-house court system to pursue fraudsters and levy fines against them.
- The decision, SEC v. Jarkesy, could have big implications for the so-called "administrative state," the alphabet soup of agencies tasked with enforcing laws governing public health and safety, among other things.
🏭 And speaking of agencies and public health, in a 5-4 ruling, the court also paused an EPA rule that sought to curb air pollution from factories and power plants. (Barrett, a Trump appointee, joined the liberal justices in dissent.)
- It's the High Court's latest move to scale back the power of the environmental agency — and part of what appears to be a bigger project to weaken the power of federal agencies.
