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Justice Jackson Warns New Ruling Could 'Devastate' Federal Regulators
The liberal justice said Congress can remedy the "profoundly destabilizing" decision by passing legislation to strengthen the federal regulatory regime.
Jul 01, 2024
As the U.S. Supreme Court dealt yet another blow to the federal government's regulatory authority, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Monday stressed that "the ball is in Congress' court" to enact legislation to "forestall the coming chaos" wrought by the right-wing supermajority's decision.
The justices ruled 6-3 in Corner Post Inc. v. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System that the Administrative Procedures Act's (APA) statute of limitations period does not begin until a plaintiff is adversely affected by a regulation. The ruling reverses a lower court's dismissal of a lawsuit filed by Corner Post—a North Dakota truck stop that challenged a U.S. Federal Reserve rule capping debit card swipe fees—because the six-year statute of limitations on such challenges had passed.
Monday's ruling makes it much easier to sue government agencies. As Sydney Bryant and Devon Ombres at the Center for American Progress explained, the decision "is intended to allow a swarm of legal challenges to rules that have protected the American people from bad actors and corporate malfeasance for decades."
"Corner Post is not the story of David versus Goliath but rather the Trojan Horse, where moneyed interests attempt to sneak in their anti-regulation politics under the guise of altruism."
In a dissent joined by fellow liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Jackson wrote that "today, the majority throws... caution to the wind and engages in the same kind of misguided reasoning about statutory limitations periods that we have previously admonished."
"The court's baseless conclusion means that there is effectively no longer any limitations period for lawsuits that challenge agency regulations on their face," she continued. "Allowing every new commercial entity to bring fresh facial challenges to long-existing regulations is profoundly destabilizing for both government and businesses. It also allows well-heeled litigants to game the system by creating new entities or finding new plaintiffs whenever they blow past the statutory deadline."
"At the end of a momentous term, this much is clear: The tsunami of lawsuits against agencies that the court's holdings in this case and Loper Bright have authorized has the potential to devastate the functioning of the federal government," Jackson added, referring to last week's 6-3 overturning of the so-called Chevron doctrine, the legal principle under which courts deferred to federal agencies' interpretations of ambiguous laws passed by Congress.
While numerous business advocates welcomed Monday's ruling, a broad range of consumer, labor, and other groups echoed the alarm in Jackson's dissent.
"Americans expect that safeguards will protect us and our families from unsafe food, products, polluted air and water, and dangerous and unfair working conditions. This decision provides special interests, opposed to the safeguards that people rely upon, with more opportunities to challenge and seek to overturn these important protections," said Rachel Weintraub, executive director of the Coalition for Sensible Safeguards.
Weintraub added that the ruling "undermines federal agencies' ability to use administrative courts to impose civil penalties for violating regulatory protections" and "starkly impedes agencies' ability to protect the public."
Bryant and Ombres wrote that "Corner Post is not the story of David versus Goliath but rather the Trojan Horse, where moneyed interests attempt to sneak in their anti-regulation politics under the guise of altruism."
Jackson's dissent states that "Congress still has a chance to address this absurdity and forestall the coming chaos" by "clarifying that the statutes it enacts are designed to facilitate the functioning of agencies, not to hobble them."
"In particular, Congress can amend §2401(a)," Jackson offered, referring to the default six-year statute of limitations, "or enact a specific review provision for APA claims, to state explicitly what any such rule must mean if it is to operate as a limitations period in this context: Regulated entities have six years from the date of the agency action to bring a lawsuit seeking to have it changed or invalidated; after that, facial challenges must end."
"By doing this," she added, "Congress can make clear that lawsuits bringing facial claims against agencies are not personal attack vehicles for new entities created just for that purpose."
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Progressives Fume as Fed Holds Working Class Hostage With High Interest Rates
"The last thing Americans need right now is another threat to their wallets from the Fed," said one Democratic congressman.
Jun 12, 2024
As the U.S. Federal Reserve again declined to lower its interest rate, progressive economists, politicians, and activists on Wednesday implored the Fed to throw working-class Americans a lifeline by implementing multiple rate cuts this year.
Fed officials said after a meeting Wednesday that while inflation has fallen toward target levels, they only envision one rate cut for the rest of this year—down from the three cuts they previously projected. The Fed rate currently stands at 5.25%-5.5%.
The Associated Pressreported:
The scaled-back estimate for rate cuts came as something of a surprise, given that the government reported earlier Wednesday that consumer inflation eased in May more than most economists had expected. That report suggested that the Fed's high-rate polices are succeeding in taming inflation.
"You know who is going to bear most of the pain of the Fed's policy?" former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Reich asked in a video posted to social media on Wednesday. "Not powerful corporations that are ratcheting up prices to pad their profit margins. Not corporate executives, not Wall Street, not the wealthy, and not the upper middle class."
"Most of the pain will be borne by lower-wage workers and the poor," Reich continued. "Researchers at the [International Monetary Fund] estimate that the unemployment rate may need to reach 7.5%—double its current level—to end America's inflation crisis. This would be about 6 million job losses. And low-wage working people will take it on the chin because they are usually the first to be fired."
"Rent prices are still high and are the main driver of inflation now," Reich said in a separate post on Wednesday, as Accountable.US released a report on corporate landlords' soaring profits. "Just so happens that recent investigations have found evidence of algorithmic price fixing by major corporate landlords. High interest rates won't fix this."
Other economists and economic justice advocates agreed.
"Only one rate cut this year would be a major misstep," said Bilal Baydoun, director of policy and research at the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive economic think tank. "Families need relief from high borrowing costs now. [Fed Chair Jerome] Powell is making it harder for families to get by."
Moody's Analytics chief analyst Mark Zandi
said on social media: "While this morning's consumer price inflation report for May probably overstates the disinflation case, it makes a strong case that inflation is headed back to the Fed's inflation target."
"All the trend lines look good," Zandi added. "It is time for the Fed to cut rates."
Key members of Congress this week also called on the Fed to slash interest rates for the sake of working Americans.
Congressman Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), the ranking member on the House Budget Committee, said in a statement Wednesday that
"holding rates too high for too long poses a grave risk to American workers."
"With the GOP pushing extreme plans that cut Social Security benefits, slash food assistance programs, and raise costs for families, the last thing Americans need right now is another threat to their wallets from the Fed," he added.
Earlier this week, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) , Jackie Rosen (D-Nev.), and John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) wrote to Powell urging interest rate cuts.
"The Fed's monetary policy is not helping to reduce inflation. Indeed, it is driving up housing and auto insurance costs—two of the key drivers of inflation—threatening the health of the economy and risking a recession that could push thousands of American workers out of their jobs," the senators noted in a letter to the Fed chair. "You have kept interest rates too high for too long: It is time to cut rates.
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Climate Campaigners Decry 'Absolutely Horrendous' Brutality Against Protesters at Fed Summit
"We have no choice but to take direct action to put our bodies on the line because petitions, sign-waving, and chanting—we tried that for the past 50 years and it hasn't worked, and we're out of time," said one arrested activist.
Aug 25, 2023
Climate campaigners on Friday condemned the violent takedown of activists during a demonstration at the annual Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium in Wyoming, an elite gathering where U.S. Federal Reserve officials, central bankers from around the world, economists, and policymakers meet, mingle, and craft financial policies that critics say are exacerbating the planetary emergency.
Multiple videos posted on social media by the direct action group Climate Defiance show law enforcement officers slamming a pair of activists on a hard floor as they chant, "End fossil finance" at the conference, which is hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. This year's theme is "Structural Shifts in the Global Economy."
One activist—25-year-old Teddy Ogborn of the group Planet Over Profit—was arrested, while other demonstrators were cited for criminal trespass, according to Eren Can Ileri, a policy advocate at the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition.
"I'm feeling a little sore but in pretty high spirits just thinking about the fact that someone has to be confronting these financial regulators who are actively choosing to fuel the climate crisis and burning the Rocky Mountains, where I'm from," Ogborn told Common Dreams.
"I am part of a global movement of young activists who see the world around us and know that progress is not being made fast enough on climate change," he continued. "People are climate laggards, they are climate delayists, they're climate deniers, and all that together means death in the near term for our futures and society as we know it."
"People want to do business as usual," Ogborn added. "Financial regulators have billionaire friends who want to watch the world burn from space. And so we have no choice but to take direct action to put our bodies on the line because petitions, sign-waving, and chanting—we tried that for the past 50 years and it hasn't worked, and we're out of time."
Ileri, who was also at the protest, told Common Dreams: "We tried to exert our democratic rights today. We tried to peacefully, nonviolently, and constructively engage the Federal Reserve on policy positions we believe are needed to save our futures. They showed us they were not open to conversation through their violence toward our activists but also by whisking the Fed chair away when we tried to approach him conversationally."
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell once again took a hawkish stance during a speech in which he said that "although inflation has moved down from its peak—a welcome development—it remains too high," and that the Fed is "prepared to raise rates further if appropriate."
Powell did not address the climate emergency or the role central banks play in fueling it. Ileri asserted that "by isolating themselves from communities facing the real economy impacts of the climate crisis," Powell and other central bankers "are allowing themselves to define risk in a way that doesn't match the risks that normal Americans face on a day-to-day basis due to the climate breakdown."
Stop the Money Pipeline co-director and San Francisco Board of Supervisors candidate Jackie Fielder responded to the heavy-handed police tactics by telling Common Dreams that "it's absolutely horrendous how security and law enforcement would assault young climate activists who are simply calling out climate denialism at the Fed."
The direct action came as a coalition of more than 70 climate advocacy groups from around the world on Friday called on policymakers—especially in the banking and insurance sectors—to:
- Adopt a precautionary approach to risk mitigation, given climate change's tipping points and unpredictable tail risks;
- Design capital buffers that specifically take into account the systemic risks of climate change; and
- Require the use of forward-looking tools, such as transition plans, which can help both authorities and market participants better understand and mitigate their own climate-related transition risks, as well as improve understanding of aggregated, systemic risks and promote accountability.
"Any symposium entitled 'Structural Shifts in the Global Economy' without a single mention of climate disasters and the billions they have cost everyday people and local economies should concern every American with a pension who agrees that climate change is here," Fielder said in a separate statement.
Akiksha Chatterji, lead campaigner at Positive Money U.S., a research and campaigning group "working to reimagine money, banks, and our economy for the well-being of people, communities, and the planet," said that "regulators are failing to act at the scale or pace necessary to curb the significant financial stability threats arising from climate change and fossil fuel financing."
"Rest assured, climate risks will materialize and we simply cannot quantify the precise nature and timing of these impacts as they are complex and ever-changing," she continued. "Emergency measures taken after a climate-driven financial crash may not suffice to contain such a meltdown."
"It's time," Chatterji added, "for the regulators and officials at this symposium to adopt a precautionary approach to climate and do their jobs before another financial crisis ensues."
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