Neil Gorsuch Compares Liberal Supreme Court Justices to 'Picky Child'

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch at the U.S Capitol Rotunda on December 3, 2018 in Washington, DC. Gorsuch compared his liberal colleagues "a picky child at the dinner table" in a concurring opinion on Thursday.

Justice Neil Gorsuch compared his liberal counterparts on the Supreme Court to a "picky child at the dinner table" in a concurring opinion.

The Supreme Court put new limits on the Securities and Exchange Commission's ability to enforce laws on Thursday, ruling that people accused of fraud by the federal agency have the right to a jury trial in federal court. In a 6-3 decision, the justices ruled along ideological lines that the SEC violates this right by allowing in-house judges to adjudicate such cases.

Gorsuch, who sided with the conservatives on the bench, wrote a lengthy concurring opinion that defended the court's decision while attacking the liberal justices who dissented.

Gorsuch said that while the dissent tried to use precedent to back up their claims, "the dissent's approach to our precedents is like a picky child at the dinner table."

"It selects only a small handful while leaving much else untouched," the justice wrote.

In the dissent penned by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, the liberal justices warned that Thursday's ruling would lead to a "massive sea change" for federal agencies.

"The constitutionality of hundreds of statutes may now be in peril, and dozens of agencies could be stripped of their power to enforce laws enacted by Congress," Sotomayor wrote. "Rather than acknowledge the earthshattering nature of its holding, the majority has tried to disguise it."

"By giving respondents a jury trial, even one that the Constitution does not require, the majority may think that it is protecting liberty. That belief, too, is deeply misguided. The American People should not mistake judicial hubris with the protection of individual rights," she said.

But Gorsuch called the dissent's use of the public rights doctrine—which protects rights like law enforcement—"astonishing."

"That my dissenting colleagues plow ahead anyway with their remarkable conception of public rights is all the more puzzling considering how regularly they have argued against that sort of sweeping concentration of governmental power," Gorsuch wrote.

"The dissent's conception of public rights is so unqualified that it refuses to commit itself on the question whether even muted forms of judicial review—such as asking executive tribunals to muster 'more than a mere scintilla' of evidence in support of their rulings—are constitutionally required in the essentially unbounded class of cases that fall within its conception of public rights," he wrote.

SEC v. Jarkesy was brought on by a Houston-based hedge fund manager who faced allegations that he violated securities laws by making misrepresentations and omitting relevant information to investors. As a result of the violations, George Jarkesy and his company were ordered by the SEC to pay $300,000 in civil penalties and turn over nearly $685,000 in illegal profits.

The SEC appealed to the Supreme Court after the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the penalties, finding that the case should have been heard before a federal court.

On Thursday, Gorsuch argued that the court's decision in the case "hardly leaves the SEC without ample powers and recourse."

"The agency is free to pursue all of its charges against Mr. Jarkesy. And it is free to pursue them exactly as it had always done until 2010: In a court, before a judge, and with a jury," he wrote in his concurring opinion.

"People like Mr. Jarkesy may be unpopular. Perhaps even rightly so: The acts he allegedly committed may warrant serious sanctions," Gorsuch said.

"But that should not obscure what is at stake in his case or others like it. While incursions on old rights may begin in cases against the unpopular, they rarely end there. The authority the government seeks (and the dissent would award) in this case—to penalize citizens without a jury, without an independent judge, and under procedures foreign to our courts—certainly contains no such limits."

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