'Trial by bureaucrat': Diverse businesses urge SCOTUS to stop federal agencies usurping courts

Less than two years after the Supreme Court banned the Securities and Exchange Commission from using its own bought-and-paid-for administrative judges to apply civil penalties and stopped privileging federal agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous laws, the high court is considering further restrictions on the administrative state…

Branded a ‘repeat offender’ just to have a day in court

“Lower courts have wrongly held that SEC enforcement targets are not entitled to jury trials in penalty-collection cases,” the New Civil Liberties Alliance wrote in a press release denouncing “trial by bureaucrat.” It filed a brief with the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors and National Federation of Independent Business Small Business Legal Center.

NCLA senior litigation counsel Russ Ryan cited a “huge disconnect between FCC’s assurance that these companies would eventually get a jury trial if the agency tried to collect its penalties in court and SEC’s insistence for decades that no jury trial is required when it collects administrative penalties in court.”

March 2, 2026

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Originally Published in Just the News