Justices Uphold Sarbanes-Oxley Act

Source: New York Times

The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley law, which sought to reform corporate America following the Enron and WorldCom accounting scandals.

The court turned aside a broad challenge to one part of the law, which established the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to regulate the accounting industry. Some commentators had forecast that the court might throw out the entire law because of problems with the way the accounting board is appointed, but the justices refused to do so.

Instead, in a 5-to-4 split, the court found that the way members of the oversight board could be removed was unconstitutional.

As a result of that decision, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which appoints the five members of the board, will now be able to remove members at will, rather than only if there is good cause.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/business/29accounting.html?src=mv

I know that I've been hard on Obama, but I'm glad he's the one who appointing SEC commissioners now, not McCain. God forbid that Palin even comes within 10,000 miles of appointing an SEC member.

Remove them at will.

I agree with AJ Breyer and the other four justices who dissented on how members could be removed from their position.

Breyer (from the article)
supervision of the accounting board “violates no separation-of-powers principle.” But it does, he said, call into question the constitutional status of many government officials.

“Reading the criteria as stringently as possible,” he wrote, “I still see no way to avoid sweeping hundreds, perhaps thousands of high level government officials within the scope of the court’s holding, putting their job security and their administrative actions and decisions constitutionally at risk.”

At least potentially among them, he said, were the leadership of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Social Security Administration, administrative law judges and military officers.