The SCOTUS case that could help Trump pack government with his loyalists

The U.S. Supreme Court will next week hear arguments in SEC v. Jarkesy, a case expected to have major implications on Trump's ambition to fill government agencies with staffers loyal to him.

In 2022, appeal judges ruled that the system the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been using to protect investors from fraud since the 1930s is unconstitutional — a ruling that was appealed again. It remains to be seen whether the Roberts Court will agree or disagree with that decision.

According to Vox's Ian Millhiser, the outcome of SEC v. Jarkesy could either help or hinder former President Donald Trump's plan to pack the federal government with loyalists if he returns to the White House in January 2025.

"None of the three rationales the [lower appeals court] offered for neutering the SEC are especially persuasive, but one of them is grounded in a pet project of the conservative Federalist Society known as the 'unitary executive' — a project for which the current court's GOP-appointed majority has shown a great deal of sympathy," Millhiser explains in an article published Tuesday.

"There is a risk, in other words, that at least some of the [lower appeal court's effort to light this decades-old agency on fire could succeed, with implications that stretch far beyond securities fraud. A sweeping decision affirming the Fifth Circuit could potentially enable former President Donald Trump to stack the federal civil service with MAGA loyalists, should he become president again."

The SEC has been around since 1934, when it was established as part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 was passed by Congress in response to the Great Depression and the Wall Street meltdown of 1929, and FDR signed it into law.

SEC v. Jarkesy,Millhiser stresses, could have an impact way beyond the SEC.

"Under the strongest version of the unitary executive theory," the Vox reporter notes, "there are few, if any, limits on a president's power to fire government employees who refuse to swear personal loyalty to that president."

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Read Vox's full report at this link.