One person can now be a quorum at the SEC
ft.comI met Paul Atkins, around this time last year. One of his biggest problems (like anyone running a federal department) was that he's not allowed to hire or increase his budget, yet the demand for work that needs SEC attention is not going down. And that's after his dept, and all others, were required to perform layoffs under DOGE.
Well he has a plan to cut his department's work in half!
Bring in the bots.
The rule: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/10/02/2026-20...
Extremely cheeky to skip out on APA rulemaking requirements
I believe it was CFTC that had a rule that no two members of its governing body could ever be in the same private space at the same time.
The idea being that they could not discuss important matters privately but only when in the official committee discussions.
This included elevators so if one of them was about to get on and the other one was already there, the first person had to let the elevator go without them.
Unless there was a third person, in which case it wasn't a private space anymore?
Article works when I click on it from Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=One%20person%20is%20now%20a%...
Aside from the obvious attack vectors, this is just an incredibly fragile system. That’s fine if you’re willing to just go ahead and make all the actual humans whole when the cards collapse, but if not, you probably want this system to fail closed.
The key change seems to be innocuous:
> The Commission is modifying 17 CFR 200.41, which establishes the Commission's quorum requirement. Three commissioners will continue to constitute a quorum of the Commission, with two important exceptions. First, consistent with the current rule, if the number of commissioners in office is two or one, that number is sufficient for a quorum. Second, if the number of commissioners in office minus the number disqualified from consideration with respect to a matter is two or one, then that number of commissioners constitutes a quorum for purposes of that matter.
Its a naked power play when placed in context, despite how inoccuous it may seem. Commissioners are appointed by the president and confirmed by the senate. They can be fired by the president unilaterally.
This new rule means that the president only have to get one of "his" guys in, and now you can own all of the SEC decisions if you want by just firing any dissenting commissioners.
In the past, that is the sort of norm that would not be broken. We are now in a world where the president trying to fire fed bankers is real, and that is arguably a much, much, more serious norm to have broken. I don't think this administration will have any issues playing to the letter of the law instead of the spirit.
So with this rule change, the effect is that a president only needs one commissioner and a lack of regard for norms to completely control SEC decisions.
“Seems to be innocuous” is genuinely funny. It must be true for almost all types of corruption and evil that if you zoom in enough, and rob the action of all surrounding context, that it could be described as “innocuous”. How aptly technocratic.
Realizing now that “the banality of evil” was right there and I failed to recognize its relevance.
This has been an excellent method to detect high-IQ but actually-retarded people. MAGA actions are distilled to their most procedural possible conception, isolated from all relevant context, and then assessed.
May as well go the full nine yards: "The Enabling Act 2026 appears to actually just be an edit to a .docx file. Hmm... My aloofness is a sign of my intelligence."
Indeed. Highly correlated (but not strictly) with Great Man syndrome, and Elon Musk fanboyism.
This is why we need the humanities. I remember one of my application essays to my university was on the merits of a “Liberal Education”[1] and I’m very grateful that I was able to properly receive one from my institution.
Removing a requirement for quorum makes the bipartisan-intended commission into a singular role appointed by and serving at the pleasure of the president, like an agency head.
> First, consistent with the current rule, if the number of commissioners in office is two or one, that number is sufficient for a quorum.
Luckily enough, the Supreme Court has given the administration the green light to fire members of commissions at will... save the Fed, because mumble mumble history and tradition mumble.
> because mumble mumble history and tradition mumble
Definitely has nothing to do with SCOTUS's retirement accounts, no sir.
> Definitely has nothing to do with SCOTUS's retirement accounts, no sir.
Who needs retirement accounts when you can just accept gifts-do-not-call-them-bribes?
* https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-un...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Thomas#Nondisclosure_...
It's just a gratiuty, not a bribe if payment comes after the act:
Not that innocuous when the commission is intended to be bipartisan but the two Democratic seats are vacant. This change formalizes uniparty rule.
From what I can tell, the only actual change is that the current rule says "two" instead of "two or one" in the last part about what happens if some Commissioners are disqualified with respect to a matter.
I can't edit my comment now but appreciate the responses I was indeed ignorant and this seemingly innocuous change is obviously not.
It's hard to tell if someone's oblivious or engaging in bad faith these days.
Totally. My first reaction was: "This person must not be from around here."
But my second was: "Oh, no, maybe this is just more targeted ignorance"
You're missing important background here. Federal law requires the commission to be non-partisan, defined as no more than three of the five commissioners being from the same party. But the Trump regime has subverted this rule by simply refusing to appoint more than three commissioners. That's why these quorum shenanigans are necessary. The proponents of this rule are acting in bad faith and will immediately file a lawsuit when the next administration tries to apply it in the other direction.
We are sitting in an uncanny valley regarding law.
Once independent agencies are no longer independent, partly due to the expansion of the unitary executive viewpoint in both the Supreme Court and the current executive branch, and the rather obsequious Congress we have that instead of being “jealous to protect its power” is kowtowing to anything the Trump administration wants.
The supreme courts ruling on presidential immunity, chevron deference, and the dismantling of the ideas of an independent agency have all come together to create a dangerous situation for all of us.
The Supreme Court, whether because the of their own alignment with partisanship or some other more nefarious reason, have gutted the idea of an independent agency (except for the Federal Reserve, which is special, but not for any legal reason, but rather because even conservative SCOTUS is not willing to risk the fallout of logically applying their unitary executive view of government to the Fed).
So Congress put a lot of regulatory power in these once independent and non-partisan agencies, and that’s gone. Combine that with a president that is overtly partisan and vindictive, and you have a problem where SCOTUS has created a situation that has elevated the whims of a president above the law Congress created.
We will be feeling the affects of this decision for generations, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the catalyst for the failure of the American form of government.
Our system cannot sustain when coequal branches of government kowtow to politics.
I'm just excited for the next POTUS to use SEAL Team 6 to quell his political opposition as "an official act" and then I'm sure SCOTUS and Congress start reevaluating some things.
Right after that ruling, I really wanted the Biden administration to construct some "official act" that would, say, cut-off power or water to the justices' houses.
Not that it would do much if most justices had no shame/principles beyond "if I like it then it's okay."
Something that is nearly completely harmless though inconvenient, yet also illustrative of the short-sightedness of such a ruling would have been so satisfying to witness. But the Democratic Party is clinging to the ideals of “norms” and “conventions” and “tradition” that Trumpism has set fire to.
I genuinely believe that once the current administration is out of office the new President should strongly campaign in favor of the strongest possible changes to prevent dictatorship: constitutional amendments to reverse some of the most egregious harm done by the Supreme Court and the general inaction in response to fascism. Then if the opposition party isn't supportive, the new President should set a date after which they threaten to abuse their powers in exactly the same ways Trump has abused his. Surely that would motivate the opposition party, right?
IMO just start with SEAL Team 6's "official actions" and then you can start proposing changes. That way you just need to motivate the people who didn't already attempt a coup.
Very little of what has happened is novel.
Frog reports water is still comfortable, though no longer lukewarm.
> We are sitting in an uncanny valley regarding law.
You guys are just now discovering how obsolete the US constitution is.
Where did the constitutional idea of an independent agency come from and what was its justification? I’ve heard a lot about the “unitary executive” but I never see what the counter argument is except for “it would be good to have independent agencies because sometimes democratic input produces bad outcomes and experts do better.” Which yeah, makes sense, nobody argues that democracies make sane decisions - but it’s always an outcome-based argument instead of a legal one.
The debate began with the First Congress, but largely petered out in the early 1800s and didn't really pick up again until the rise of the regulatory state in the early 1900s.
There are newer law review articles but none quite so comprehensive and earnest as Cass R. Sunstein & Lawrence Lessig, "The President and the Administration," 94 Columbia Law Review 1 (1994), https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/journal_articles/7779/
That's the same Lawrence Lessig who fought (and lost) copyright extension. 1994 is long before tribal politics became as pervasive and extreme in academia as it is today (not that it didn't exist back then). The paper pulls its punches and assumes unitary executive proponents are arguing in good faith, rather than rationalizing a foregone conclusion.
Thank you for the link. I will certainly give it a read but I'm sure the HN thread will be long dead by the time I read and absorb it.
My main beef with the tenor of this whole thread in general is people do not seem aware of the historical rises and falls in executive power. For example, perhaps they did not call it a "unitary executive" then, but the executive power surely reached its zenith under FDR, with all sorts of behaviors and actions we would regard now with boggled eyes and before which even Trump's more radical actions tend to pale. [Perhaps most applicable to this thread, FDR openly wielded the power of the 'independent' FCC to silence his opposition, to the point where NBC and CBS felt compelled to announce they "would not air any broadcast that was in any way critical of any policy of the Administration.".] Everything worked out OK.
Ironically, of course, that's also the guy who was probably most responsible for the explosion of the size of the administrative state - he really, in a meaningful sense, refounded American government. And while there was good and obvious reasons for the immense expansion of the administrative state, and I'm open to legal reasons either way, I'm becoming increasingly convinced that there's really good social reasons to not have "independent" agencies - I suspect more direct democratic input (the President does X) nets out better in terms of social trust and cohesiveness even when it makes often much dumber decisions.
The Supreme Court already gave you an answer by pussyfooting around the FED's independence, despite their own legal reasoning that independent agencies can't exist.
It came from Congress creating those agencies as is their right to do so, and they were created with the idea of not being weaponize for partisan purposes. We really don't want the DOJ to be the personal enforcement of the president's whims against his political enemies.
It seems controversial that Congress could create independent executive agencies. Could they make the entire executive independent except for the military? Why or why not?
And while I agree we don’t want the DoJ treated that way, that’s how it’s been operated since its beginnings! If anything the past few decades have been relatively not so bad. And regardless of what I want that doesn’t answer whether it would be within Congresses power to make it independent of the President.
> It seems controversial that Congress could create independent executive agencies.
To whom? The U.S. Constitution says that Congress has the power
"To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."
That's rather clear.
The legislative branch makes those laws and the executive branch executes them. Beyond that its role is limited ... commander-in-chief of the military, pardon power, making treaties (with approval of the legislature), appointing ambassadors, judges, and other officers (with approval of the legislature).
The legislature creates (or removes) the departments and sets forth their duties. The role of the executive is to see to it that the departments carry out those duties as established by the legislature.
The "unitary executive" is not to be found in the U.S. Constitution ... it's a creation of authoritarians.
The Congress, representing the will of the people as their reps, has the most power of three branches. The president is technically elected by the states via the Electoral College unlike Congressional representatives.
The president is supposed to answer to Congress. The purpose was not to have an exectuive wielding the power of a king or a tyrant, which the US founding fathers were worried about.
Actually, the founding fathers were mostly worried about the President being dependent on Congress. They were very worried about that and didn’t want him to be! That impeachment cases would be tried in Congress was very controversial and ultimately agreed to because they figured they wouldn’t become politicized.
You can read the Convention notes yourself! Don’t let other people tell you what they thought.You might be surprised! For example, many argued that the President should not be impeachable at all!
> Don’t let other people tell you what they thought.
Ok, I won't let you tell me what they thought, like you just did.
> My main beef with the tenor of this whole thread in general is people do not seem aware ...
Such ad hominems are tiresome and more often than not are projection. You have made a number of claims here that simply aren't true.
I won't respond again.
"unitary executive" is just Modern Standard American for "Führerprinzip": all authority flows directly from Dear Leader down, all the way from the White House to the schoolteacher and the cop.
"This rule is effective on October 2, 2026."
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/10/02/2026-20...
This is really bad. Now you can have one puppet, and no dissent.
The FCC is set up for this same tactic. 2 vacancies, so down to the minimum quorum there right now. They can change the rule and let Anna Gomez's term expire. Suddenly we'll be reviewing everyone's licenses and seeing all the TV and radio content becoming more right-wing.
That's what's been happening already with the merger of Skydance, Paramount and HBO/Warner/Discovery.
> all the TV and radio content becoming more right-wing
Already happening. Also, I support diversity in media without regards to ideology because diversity in media increases the peoples' power and freedom against the ownership and political power classes.
Corruption is so much easier now!