The feds won one. In an 8-1 blowout, the Supreme Court just handed the Trump administration a massive victory, upholding the FCC’s power to slap telecom giants with heavy fines for playing fast and loose with customer location data.
AT&T and Verizon are crying foul over a cool $100 million in penalties. They claimed the FCC’s fine-first, ask-questions-later setup violated their constitutional rights to a jury. Cry me a river. Still, the corporate giants didn’t walk away entirely empty-handed. The administration threw them a bone, admitting they don’t actually have to cough up the cash while they are still fighting the orders in court.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, kept it simple. The FCC’s orders did not actually force the carriers to pay up immediately, so no harm, no foul. Justice Clarence Thomas, the lone holdout, wanted to give the telecom giants an easier way to claw back their cash. He lost.
It wasn’t just phones. Had the telecoms won, federal enforcement across the board would have crumbled. Earthjustice popped the champagne, relieved that environmental regulators still have teeth. Meanwhile, the libertarian crowd at the New Civil Liberties Alliance put on a brave face, suggesting this loophole might actually embolden companies to sue the government more often.
It is a rare reprieve for the administrative state. This conservative court has spent years systematically gutting federal agency power, stripping regulators of their weapons against everything from securities fraud to environmental pollution. For once, the bureaucrats survived the chopping block. Don’t expect it to last.
