{"id":197,"date":"2026-06-12T22:09:43","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T22:09:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=197"},"modified":"2026-06-12T22:09:43","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T22:09:43","slug":"our-most-maga-court-created-another-mess-for-scotus-to-clean-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=197","title":{"rendered":"Our Most MAGA Court Created Another Mess for SCOTUS to Clean Up"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The nation\u2019s most conservative appeals court keeps getting beaten up at the Supreme Court, but its judges adamantly refuse to take the hint. On Thursday, the 5th<\/sup> U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals federal horse racing regulations to be unconstitutional, ignoring not one but two <\/em>pointed signals from SCOTUS that the law is perfectly valid. Its decision arrived just hours after the Supreme Court\u2019s of the 5th<\/sup> Circuit so far this term, with several more likely to come\u2014a humiliating record for the appeals court. This trend shows no sign of stopping: If anything, the 5th<\/sup> Circuit\u2019s MAGA judges seem proud of their reversal rate, eager to dig in and dare the justices to stop them. Now the lower court is forcing SCOTUS to clean up yet another mess of their own making by rescuing an important regulatory scheme that the 5th<\/sup> Circuit remains strangely committed to destroying.<\/p>\n

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\n<\/div>\n

Before diving into the 5th<\/sup> Circuit\u2019s latest misadventure, it\u2019s worth lingering on the sheer scale of its losing streak. The numbers tell the story: Just last term, the justices took up 13 cases from the appeals court, more than from any other, and reversed it in 10 of them. The losses have continued to pile up this term: Once again, the 5th<\/sup> Circuit looks poised to have the highest reversal rate of any appeals court. And that doesn\u2019t even include shadow docket decisions, like SCOTUS\u2019 7\u20132 decision last month halting the 5th <\/sup>Circuit\u2019s attempt to block distribution of an abortion medication via telehealth. The pattern is impossible to miss: Republican litigants bring aggressive theories to the appeals court, which MAGA judges promptly embrace; the Supreme Court is then left to decide how much damage it\u2019s willing to undo. For a different appeals court, that record might inspire some humility. On the 5th<\/sup> Circuit, it only seems to inspire more defiance.<\/p>\n

Consider Thursday\u2019s in National Horsemen\u2019s Benevolent and Protective Association v. Black<\/em>. The 5th <\/sup>Circuit\u2019s ruling neuters a law that Congress enacted in 2020 to impose nationwide standards on the horse racing industry after the existing state-by-state patchwork failed to prevent . Rather than saddle an existing agency with additional duties, Congress delegated rulemaking and enforcement power to a private corporation known as the Horseracing Authority. In 2022, the 5th<\/sup> Circuit that this arrangement delegated \u201cgovernment power to a private entity without sufficient agency supervision\u201d and struck it down. So Congress amended the statute to give the Federal Trade Commission ultimate authority over horse racing rules and their enforcement. Yet in 2024, the 5th<\/sup> Circuit once again the law, holding that it still gave the Horseracing Authority too much discretion over enforcement.<\/p>\n

At that point, the government had no choice but to seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court. And the justices , preventing the 5th<\/sup> Circuit from effectively nullifying federal horse racing regulations. That intervention sent a clear message that the justices were deeply skeptical of the appeals court\u2019s ruling and unwilling to let it blow up the regulator. Then, seven months later, SCOTUS formally the 5th<\/sup> Circuit\u2019s decision and ordered it to reconsider in light of a recent decision, . That 6\u20133 ruling held that Congress can<\/em> delegate oversight authority to a \u201cprivate entity\u201d as long as that entity \u201cfunctioned subordinately to\u201d a federal agency that \u201cretains decision-making power.\u201d The agency structure approved in Consumers\u2019 Research<\/em> neatly describes how the Horseracing Authority operates, too. As both the 6th<\/sup> and 8th<\/sup> U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals the regulator\u2019s powers in separate rulings, federal law (as amended) clearly makes the (private) Horseracing Authority subordinate to the (public) Federal Trade Commission, resolving any constitutional issues.<\/p>\n

Consider the from the 6th<\/sup> Circuit, which incorporated Consumers\u2019 Research <\/em>into its reasoning, and which presides over Kentucky, home of the Kentucky Derby. The appeals court rejected a claim that the Horseracing Authority violates the \u201cprivate nondelegation doctrine,\u201d a constitutional rule that limits Congress\u2019 ability to imbue a private entity with significant legal authority on behalf of the federal government. In an opinion by Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton, a George W. Bush appointee who is one of the more well-respected court of appeals judges in the country, the 6th<\/sup> Circuit held that the horse racing statute was constitutional because it gave \u201cFTC ultimate discretion over the content of the rules that govern the horseracing industry.\u201d The FTC, after all, can review any safety rules the Horseracing Authority proposes. It also has full authority to review and reverse any investigation the Horseracing Authority makes into violations of the act, and can determine whom the Authority should investigate. No matter how you slice the statute, Sutton wrote, the fact remains that \u201cthe FTC is free to micromanage every particularized decision the Authority makes.\u201d Notably, the conservative 8th<\/sup> Circuit reached .<\/p>\n

But the 5th<\/sup> Circuit felt it knew better than these courts. In his decision for the court Thursday, Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, a Donald Trump appointee, reiterated his earlier conclusion that Congress gave the Horseracing Authority too much power to enforce violations of law. Presented with arguments that the Authority\u2019s structure mirrors another private board accountable to the Securities and Exchange Commission, he nitpicked random differences between the statutory schemes, such as how the SEC can remove board members for cause, but only the Authority as a whole can remove its board members.<\/p>\n

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And what about the Supreme Court\u2019s recent assessment of private nondelegation in Consumers\u2019 Research<\/em>, in which six justices indicated that Congress has sweeping discretion to empower a private entity as long as it\u2019s under the ultimate control of a federal agency? That precedent didn\u2019t stand a chance when pitted against the 5th<\/sup> Circuit\u2019s disdain for the administrative state. Duncan insisted that Consumers\u2019 Research <\/em>did nothing to change or alter this area of the law, because it involved an arrangement that ostensibly gave a federal agency more oversight than the FTC has here. He brazenly asserted that the Supreme Court\u2019s narrowing of the private nondelegation doctrine \u201conly reinforces our previous conclusion\u201d to broadly apply the same doctrine to shut down another federal law. The Supreme Court will have to correct the 5th<\/sup> Circuit\u2019s error in Horsemen III<\/em> just as it did with Horsemen II<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The 5th<\/sup> Circuit\u2019s opinion raises several questions. For starters, how many times can this very case go up to the Supreme Court with the same outcome? Will there be a Horsemen IV, V, VI<\/em>? There may eventually be enough Horsemen <\/em>to run a whole race with the number of reversed opinions the 5th<\/sup> Circuit brings to bear. Moreover, could it actually be a good thing that the 5th<\/sup> Circuit clutters SCOTUS\u2019 docket with so many obviously wrong decisions? After all, this is a Supreme Court that sees each passing case as an opportunity to reconsider whether Americans have any fundamental rights. So if it has to waste its limited resources on reversing outrageous 5th<\/sup> Circuit decisions all the time, could that really be so bad?<\/p>\n

We wouldn\u2019t be so sure. For one thing, SCOTUS\u2019 incessant reversals of the 5th<\/sup> Circuit have a way of sane-washing the Supreme Court itself, making the justices look restrained and moderate by comparison. More broadly, a lower court that\u2019s detached from the legal reality of the rest of the judiciary is capable of committing grave harm even if its worst opinions are overturned in the end. As we mentioned, the 5th<\/sup> Circuit is obsessed with imposing abortion pill bans. It is stacked with judges who use their opinions to audition for a future Supreme Court nomination. It laughs off the religious liberty of non-Christians by allowing the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom across Texas. And it rules again and again and again that federal agencies cannot possibly hold the authority that Congress gave them to improve the lives of the American people (and their horses).<\/p>\n

Until they are formally reversed, these decisions create immense uncertainty for those whom the law is meant to benefit. Congress has spent six years trying to create a stable, uniform scheme of horse racing regulations. The 5th<\/sup> Circuit is still trying to thwart its goal. The only winners here are bad actors who want to abuse horses and fix races without federal punishment. And the judges who keep enabling them should stop pretending that their crusade is about constitutional restraint rather than regulatory destruction.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more The Autocrat\u2019s Game<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Why is this MAGA court so obsessed with a horse racing law?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":196,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[156,10,18,11,15],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jurisprudence","tag-animals","tag-donald-trump","tag-judiciary","tag-jurisprudence","tag-supreme-court"],"yoast_head":"\nOur Most MAGA Court Created Another Mess for SCOTUS to Clean Up - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=197\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Our Most MAGA Court Created Another Mess for SCOTUS to Clean Up - 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