The Supreme Court Wants to Crush Regulation—But Not the Fed

This is an abbreviated version of the History Channel gibberish that Justices Sam Alito and Neil Gorsuch served up in their dissent in Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Community Financial Services Association (see page 21, footnote 16). Only now the Republican majority is pushing a little harder the idea that the “quasi-private” nature of the Fed (whatever that means) makes it different from other independent agencies. Tell that to the officials DOGE removed, with assistance from District of Columbia cops, from the United States Institute for Peace, a genuinely independent nonprofit funded by the federal government. (Last week, a judge ruled that this was, indeed, unlawful.)

Justice Elena Kagan, in a fine dissent also signed by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, called bullshit on all this. “Our emergency docket,” Kagan wrote, “while fit for some things, should not be used to overrule or revise existing law.” Yes. On the purported harm from letting Wilcox and Harris return to their jobs, Kagan wrote: “What matters … is not that Wilcox and Harris would love to keep serving in their nifty jobs. What matters instead is that Congress provided for them to serve their full terms.” Yes.

Kagan also mocked the majority’s “bespoke Federal Reserve exception,” stating that “the Federal Reserve’s independence rests on the same constitutional and analytic foundations as that of the NLRB, MSPB, FTC, FCC, and so on—which is to say it rests largely on Humphrey’s.” Kagan added that “If the idea is to reassure the markets,” then the majority should have upheld Humphrey’s until the high court could actually rule on it. Markets really like to see civil order and the disinterested pursuit of justice!  I don’t think the markets especially noticed Thursday’s ruling, but that’s only because they were too busy keeping abreast of Trump’s tariffs and research funding cutoffs and other gleeful sabotage of the economy. They’ll notice when Trump fires Powell.