In lieu of the Supreme Court deciding today that the Revolutionary War was a big mistake, and we should’ve just stuck with having a king after all, the other big case SCOTUS sharted out to the peasants today seems like minor undigested corn kernels. But Corner Post Inc. vs. Board of Governors of The Federal Reserve System is some fucktified bullshit worth mentioning too.
Corner Post is a North Dakota truck stop that opened in 2018. They challenged a US Federal Reserve rule that required them to accept debit cards, and also pay fees on every debit card transaction. A lower court dismissed their challenge based on the six-year statute of limitations to challenges to an agency action. The action was in 2011, making any challenge to the debit card requirement expire in 2017, though Corner Post didn’t open for business until a year later. The law was that the six-year statute of limitations period starts when a claim “first accrues,” but the court changed it so that the statute of limitations begins when a party has been injured.
So, this SCOTUS decision makes the decision in Loper Bright retroactively effective, allowing challenges to the very limits of space and time! In layman’s terms, it’s an open invitation for corporations to sue away and get rid of any troublesome regulations they don’t like, no matter how long those regulations have been in effect. It implodes the administrative state’s ability to regulate anything as fast as a billionaire’s submersible.
Protecting consumers from corporate malfeasance? Nah, it’s the corporations who need protecting from that troublesome public, who want things like clean air, and water, and airplane doors that don’t go flying off while they’re soaring over Alaska.
Nearly every circuit court has held, and the Supreme Court itself recognized in 2018, that the statute of limitations for challenges to regulations begins when those regulations are finalized — in Corner Post’s case, the clock began running in 2011. But Corner Post complained that since their business was founded in 2018, this gave them no opportunity to sue. And the usual six assholes agreed.
So now, all that Toxic Polluting Chemical Company Inc. needs to do to have standing to sue is open a new company, Toxic Polluting Chemical Company Junior, and they can use that company to challenge the regulation and get around the statute of limitations. TPCC Jr. can complain that the EPA not letting them dump shit in the water is unfair, and courts can now overrule the EPA, because SCOTUS has decided that judges are experts on how much literal shit is safe to have in your sandwiches, and not the dumb-o-crats whose job it is to figure that stuff out.
As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent: “Doctrines that were now settled are unsettled, and claims that lacked merit a year ago are suddenly up for grabs. […] The tsunami of lawsuits against agencies that the Court’s holdings in this case and Loper Bright have authorized has the potential to devastate the functioning of the Federal Government.”
To which Leonard Leo cackled, while tenting his fingers, “That’s the entire point! Drown the government in the bathtub, and then make the peasants drink the bathwater! Drink it up!”
Hey King Charles, is it too late for us to come crawling back?! Sorry about the Revolutionary War and all those tampon jokes! You know you’ve always been our boo! We’ll behave and be a good colony again, we promise!
SIGH.
[ruling]
