Hidden in the lengthy and complex Supreme Court opinions released Thursday was a none-too-subtle jab at liberal colleagues who dissented and warned their conservative colleagues were unleashing "chaos" on Congress.
Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of three justices appointed by former President Donald Trump, compared justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagen and Ketanji Brown Jackson to disobedient youths in his concurring opinion in the Securities Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy ruling.
"But the dissent’s approach to our precedents is like a picky child at the dinner table," wrote Gorsuch. "It selects only a small handful while leaving much else untouched."
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For her part, Sotomayor — who authored the dissent — accused Chief Justice John Roberts, Gorsuch and fellow yea-voters of critically weakening a crucial tenet of American democracy.
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"Beyond the majority’s legal errors, its ruling reveals a far more fundamental problem: This Court’s repeated failure to appreciate that its decisions can threaten the separation of powers," Sotomayor wrote.
"Congress had no reason to anticipate the chaos today’s majority would unleash after all these years."
The case centers on George Jarkesy, a hedge fund manager accused of defrauding investors, and whether he was entitled to a jury trial when the government sent him to an administrative law judge, notes Vox Supreme Court analyst Ian Millhiser.
While Jarkesy claimed he had a right to a jury trial in the civil litigation, Sotomayor argued nearly 170 years of precedent said otherwise.
In ruling in his favor, the court may have rendered useless a "wide range of laws" that rely on the presumption that certain proceedings will go before administrative law judges, Millhiser argues.
"The Jarkesy case, in other words, is an example of the Roberts Court at its most arrogant," he writes. "By upending this longstanding assumption, the Court may have just thrown huge swaths of the federal government — particularly enforcement by those agencies Sotomayor listed — into chaos."