April 21, 2026 — SCOTUS AM (Spring Arguments Day 2)

RFK Jr., as HHS Secretary, had issued a declaration in December threatening to strip all federal funding from any hospital that provided gender-affirming care to trans youth — anywhere in the country. Oregon and other states sued. On Saturday, the district court vacated the declaration entirely and issued a permanent injunction. The court had zero patience for the administration's First Amendment framing — trying to claim the declaration was protected speech. The judge said: "Defendants cannot bully or gaslight this court into ignoring the many procedural and legal flaws of the Kennedy Declaration by invoking one of the most sacred principles of our constitutional democracy, the freedom of speech." The declarative relief issued by the court was explicit: the feds lacked the authority to set standards of care that override professionally recognized standards in the plaintiff states, and they lacked the authority to exclude providers from federal programs for following those state-recognized standards. In other words: what doctors are allowed to do in Oregon is set by Oregon, not by RFK Jr. Bryan: "RFK's latest bear carcass is back in the woods where it belongs."

Two consolidated cases about whether the FCC, an agency rather than a court, can impose fines without violating the Seventh Amendment's guarantee of a jury trial for "causes at common law" over $20. The immediate parallel: a 2024 SCOTUS case (*Jarkesy*) said the SEC couldn't do the same thing for securities fraud cases, because fraud was historically a court question — a "private right" — so the defendant had a right to a jury. The deeper issue was the Public Rights Doctrine, which Bryan traced back to *Murray's Lessee* (1856): Congress can assign some questions to non-Article III courts (immigration courts, administrative agencies) but only "public rights" — things historically resolved by the executive or legislative branch. Private rights, meaning things historically adjudicated by courts, must stay in courts. The problem: SCOTUS has recently been reclassifying what counts as a private right, and *Jarkesy* was the clearest sign yet. Now everyone was figuring out what that means for agency enforcement. But the government had a wrinkle: technically, the FCC's fine isn't self-executing. If AT&T doesn't pay, the FCC has five years to take it to federal court — where AT&T would get a jury. The government's argument: they already have a jury option, just not until enforcement. Whether that satisfied the Seventh Amendment or just deferred the constitutional problem was the question Bryan expected the court to wrestle with. Bryan's framing: the walls of the government were "a little Jell-O right now," and this case might either clean up the post-*Jarkesy* confusion or make it worse.