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Comment by ta988 | Hacker News Reader

The supreme court, and its now usual right leaning bias neutered the SEC a bit more: https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/supreme-court-rules-...

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Another way to see that would be the Supreme Court affirming that if the SEC accuses you of what is clearly common law fraud, and wants to penalize you millions of dollars, they are required by the Constitution to bring those charges to Article III courts where you can exercise all the rights of the accused recognized by the Constitution (most specifically in this case, trial by jury).

There's no other way to see it.

I'm not sure why the parent comment decided to bring politics into it. You'd think the idea that the government shouldn't be able to accuse you of a crime and take your money without a trial would be bipartisan.

> I'm not sure why the parent comment decided to bring politics into it.

The Federalist Society and their fellow travelers have been politicizing the Supreme Court for literal decades. To talk about the Supreme Court while avoiding any mention of politics is a itself a stridently political act.

Further back then that. Supreme Court has been a political institution all along. (The Marbury vs. Madison decision was an interesting political maneuver.)

> I'm not sure why the parent comment decided to bring politics into it.

It's the standard way to denounce decisions you don't like.

There was a recent video by John Oliver going deep into the politics of the supreme court, so it's in the public discourse enough recently that the two concepts of justice and politics are probably linked for some folks.

It's one of those annoying things that tends to happen a month out from presidential elections I guess.

John Oliver has enough bad takes and lies that I'm at the point that if he says something, I assume it's a lie at this point. Or at least his conclusions are lies

Yeah I tend to take it more as satire or wild exaggeration than real investigative reporting.

When his buddy Joel McHale, who also acted on the fictional TV show "Community" along with John Oliver, tried making his own hot take comedy news show, it really put things in perspective for me.

Now I watch it for the comedy aspect as much as anything I see on other news media these days. Take what I see with John Oliver amped up to a solid 9 or 10, divide it by 10, and that's probably how serious or impactful the thing actually is that he is reporting on.

So you request a jury trial. I don’t get what your point is. Its a civil penality because the SEC isn’t a law enforcement agency and it enforces regulations. Regulations have been around since George Washington was president when the Whiskey Act was passed allowing the government to form regulations on taxing whiskey including levying fines on people.

You couldn’t “request a jury trial”. That was the point of the suit.

Yes, civil penalties are a thing. But the argument that prevailed was that this was not a penalty for speeding or not paying enough tax, this was a penalty for alleged actions that amounted to common law fraud & Congress can’t delegate the adjudication of common law—civil or criminal—to an administrative agency.

And regulations are still enforceable. What is not enforceable is to make a regulation that parallels an existing law, and deny a federal trial because it’s now a “regulation”.

Are SEC the good guys? I can't keep up.

Gensler met with FTX fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried and had a secret zoom call with him as the press later found out. FTX always advertised how they were "regulated". Yet despite not even having proper book-keeping¹, they were never investigated by the SEC, which has been focused on hassling legitimate businesses such as Coinbase - a public company with proper compliance and actual audits.

¹ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/new-ftx-chief-sl...

FTX was receiving inquiries from SEC in early 2022, before its collapse: https://prospect.org/power/congressmembers-tried-to-stop-sec...

Also “doing audits” and “having compliance” and “being public” doesn’t insulate a company from scrutiny.

The real world is messier than Disney’s “good guys bad guys” dichotomy.

No, they're not.

Should have been quite clear when Madoff ran a 20 billion USD ponzi for multiple decades and he got caught because his own sons turned him in at the FBI.

The SEC was not involved in Madoff at all (other than to make it worse my "auditing" Madoff multiple times and publishing that "all is fine nothing to see here").

The SEC is a government marketing agency to keep up the veil of US markets being fair and functional.

They can be incompetent without being bad. It is a mistake to assume nefarious intent.

You don’t have to be nefarious to be bad. Being incompetent definitely makes an federal agency with powers of enforcement bad.

"Bad" can also apply to results or execution (performance, in/competence), not just intent.

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