Three decisions -- first Fischer, which is of immediate importance to quite a few people.

This case turned on the DOJ's decision to abuse Sarbanes-Oxley as a means of charging Jan 6 defendants with obstruction of justice based on, to quote the opinion

...imposes criminal liability on anyone who corruptly “alters, destroys, mutilates, or conceals a record, document, or other object, or attempts to do so, with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding.” 18 U. S. C. §1512(c)(1). The next subsection extends that prohibition to anyone who “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” §1512(c)(2)."

This was a "novel theory" that was clearly not envisioned when Congress wrote the law.  If you recall this law was enacted after Enron had prosecutions fail because the alleged guilty party didn't commit an offense directly, but basically told someone else to who had no other liability and they would have been  liable if they did the same thing themselves, but managed to evade it via this mechanism.

I'd argue that evasion was improper but it is what it is and SarBox was passed to close that method of obstruction, making attempting to prevent an official proceeding via an act of either fabrication or destruction of something (directly or indirectly) that evidences corrupt intent but isn't itself a crime illegal -- if the outcome obstructs an official proceeding.

Ok, as far as it goes and in that realm.

But the January 6th defendants didn't destroy or fabricate evidence by their actions, nor did they induce anyone else to do so, which is the element of criminality that SarBox explicitly addressed.

In other words the DOJ tried to extend the statute beyond the four corners of the page and the clear intent from Congress when it was passed, but Congress never ratified that extension prior to the acts in question on January 6th.  Ratifying it now could only encompass future acts, since the ex-post-facto clause prohibits making something illegal later that wasn't at the time it occurred, and in any event thus far (more than three years in) Congress has declined to act in that regard.

The statutory analysis is quite clear and in no way implicates any sort of "new" holding.  In fact to the contrary as it was the DOJ that maliciously sought to find a statute that they could abuse through their own interpretation which is simply not a power they have.

Congress makes laws and the Executive enforces them; the Executive, of which the DOJ is a part, cannot write its own laws or amend existing ones.

This likely impacts many people already sentenced for acts undertaken on January 6th along with a large number of pending cases and is a slap in the face to the DOJ's attempt to reimagine SarBox to suit their purposes, remanding the case in question that reached the court.  It doesn't, however, exonerate anyone who, for example, trespassed or committed what amounts to vandalism; physical damage and trespass remain illegal of course, but the fact pattern for each person in the case of trespass is different (many of the Jan 6 defendants were literally waved through an open door by a police officer, which makes a claim of "criminal trespass" laughably defective.)  Indeed it also impacts some of the pending Trump indictments and, in combination with the immunity claim which is still to come as to a decision, essentially all of them.

That this took nearly four years to reach the Supremes is an outrage, and so are those who were sentenced (and presumably have served time) on a serious felony charge that is now declared legally void.  I suspect there will be an attempt to hold people accountable for that but I have no odds on success in that regard.  However, an attempt to do this sort of "creative interpretation" in the future now comes with an attendant risk of personal liability for malicious prosecution, and thus should pretty-much stomp on any future DOJ attempt to do so.

The second, Loper Bright, is a jurisdictional earthquake long overdue.

I put these together (along with the third) as one Ticker because they're fundamentally the same thing.  All three cases turn on the question as to whether an Executive Department or Administrative Agency can effectively color into a law that which is not clearly there, when the Constitution sets forth that it is the exclusive purview of Congress to craft laws and the Executive is required to enforce them as-written, not as they might prefer they be written.

Specifically this case addresses what is known as The Chevron Deference for the case in which it arose, where the Supremes found that a reasonable Administrative interpretation where ambiguity was believed by an agency to exist was presumptively correct.  That didn't mean you couldn't challenge it but it did mean you had a very difficult road to travel in doing so because it was presumed the agency both acted in good faith and had the right interpretation as they saw it, and that was valid.

In other words rather than entrust Judges and Juries to interpret the fact pattern in the fact of a potential case or controversy and assign the duty to interpret the law to said courts as the Constitution provides and which traces directly to The Federalist and, I might add, in the American era as held valid in Marbury .v. Madison this doctrine instead usurped that authority into unelected members of the Executive Branch and away from both Judiciary and Congress.

The 1984 decision in Chevron in fact turned the APA itself and all precedent prior on its ear.  The problem is that the APA, an act of Congress, said the exact opposite and in fact even an act of Congress can't change this as the Constitution delegates this authority!

Indeed when there is controversy the alleged "expertise" of an agency is far less reviewable and public than that of a courtroom.  Judges deal with this every day in the process of evidentiary hearings; various experts, many of them at odds with one another, testify and offer evidence that is weighed.  The Chevron decision essentially destroyed that process of review in favor of allowing an administrative agency to present its exclusive view of such an interpretation without any capacity to examine the evidence, sources, and potential conflicts of interest, declaring that because it was from an Executive Agency it was above reproach and thus presumptively correct, forcing the challenger to prove it either wrong or corrupt.

Tossing this decision is decades overdue, particularly given the wild-eyed expansion of this decision's reach over the last few decades.  The Justices were, however, quite-careful to state that no, this doesn't automatically void everything done under the former view in that "stare decisis" controls in those cases and thus if someone wishes to bring an attempt to reverse one or more of those decisions they still will have to show both standing and cause to believe the former interpretation is wrong.

This will, however, stick a fork in (for example) BATFE attempts to claim that a "bump stock" is a "machine gun" when the term "machine gun" is in fact defined in the statute, forcing BATFE to return to Congress and get the statute amended should they wish to proceed.  (You might note that decision was overturned in this session of the court as well, which I note further on.)

The third from a few days ago, SEC .v. Jarkesy, is for all intents and purposes the same thing.  Here the SEC had arrogated to itself via Dodd-Frank the right to remove a penalty proceeding from the courts into administrative action.  The Supremes found this was a wild-eyed violation of the 7th Amendment when the finding and proposed penalty is best characterized as a penalty that would attach to a civil tort.  A purely restitutive order, that is that a malefactor had done something dishonest or otherwise in violation of SEC regulations and the order was to return to the damaged party the property they formerly had (typically money in the context of securities, of course) can be administratively handled but an action that essentially fines someone (where the proceeds go to the government) or is intended in whole or part to punish implicates the 7th Amendment right to trial by jury.

Originally the Securities Act did not permit this sort of cudgel but the 2010 Dodd-Frank law added that to the SEC's list of powers.  Jarkesy was subsequently accused of securities fraud, an offense which is at its essence identical to the common-law tort of fraud.  The 7th Amendment was written specifically because this sort of administrative adjudication of alleged torts was one of the means by which the British tormented the Colonists, who had no right of judicial review.  Again the allocation of this power dates back to The Federalist as it does in the Chevron case, and again even Congress can't change that absent a Constitutional Amendment.

There are those who are screaming about all of this but the fact of the matter is that all three cases are at their essence the same question, the same controversy and have the same answer.  The Constitution sets forth the prime "Rules of the Road" and if you don't like them then the proper method to alter that is to amend the Constitution, as we have done several times through the years.

Cases and Controversies have as their proper place of adjudication in our Constitutional system a public courtroom where experts can vie to present their opinions on the facts, if challenged they must be able to defend them in open court against attempts to impeach their testimony so the public can see what's going on, the record then presents itself in written form as precedent (particularly when such is taken up on appeal and affirmed or overturned) and thus in the future people can look to said public record with a reasonable belief that, absent a future public court proceeding they can act in accordance with that record of decisions and know what the outcome will be in advance.  Administrative entities acting behind a closed door offering an "expert opinion" that cannot be countered or impeached because it is stamped "theirs" and thus controls is unconstitutional in the first instance as is well-documented all the way back to The Federalist and original debates on our government's formation, and that is in fact at the core of all three of these holdings.

To put it in short form with regards to all three rulings (and Cargill as well since we're on the current court term's decisions, which is basically the same thing): It's about damn time.