Supreme Court, Citing Precedent It Just Issued Friday, Remands Three HISA-Related Cases Back To Appeals Courts

[Wandering Eyes]

The three lawsuits that have been simmering in the federal court system for several years and were all vying for the attention of the United States Supreme Court to decide the constitutionality of the Horseracing and Safety Integrity Act (HISA) are all headed back to their originating appeals courts.

The Supreme Court on Monday morning issued nearly identical “summary dispositions” for all of the active cases involving the constitutionality of HISA.

Each of the separate petitions for a “writ of certiorari” were answered by orders that technically granted consideration by the nation's highest court to take on their cases.

But instead of deciding those matters by full briefing and oral argument in front of the Supreme Court at a later date, the Supreme Court instead opted to deal with those cases right away by vacating each lower court's decision and sending each one back to its originating federal appeals court for reconsideration in light of a relevant decision the Supreme Court just issued on Friday.

The new precedent that the Supreme Court now wants the Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Circuits of the U.S. Court of Appeals to reconsider involves a case titled Federal Communications Commission (FCC) vs. Consumers' Research.

In that case, the justices, by a 6-3 vote June 27, rejected arguments that the funding mechanism for a service that provides subsidized telecommunications services for low-income customers, rural hospitals, schools, and libraries violated the non-delegation doctrine.

The Supreme Court also shot down allegations that the FCC delegated too much authority to a private company to administer the program.

The non-delegation doctrine, which bans Congress from delegating legislative power to federal agencies without an “intelligible principle” to guide the exercise of agency discretion, is central to each of the HISA-related cases.

The Supreme Court has essentially decided that last Friday's just-issued precedent related to non-delegation now gives each of the appeals courts enough guidance to decide the cases at that level.

According to the American Bar Association Journal, the last time the Supreme Court cited the non-delegation doctrine to invalidate a federal law was in 1935.

The Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Circuit appeals courts have all agreed that HISA's rulemaking structure is constitutional. Only the Fifth Circuit has disagreed, in part, by opining that HISA's enforcement provisions are unconstitutional.

The petition to the Supreme Court out of the Fifth Circuit, which was initiated by the defendant, the HISA Authority, involved a lawsuit spearheaded by the National Horsemen's Benevolent and Protective Association. A Fifth Circuit appeals court panel opined July 5, 2024, that even though HISA's rulemaking structure is constitutional, HISA's enforcement provisions are unconstitutional.

The petition originating out of the Sixth Circuit stemmed from a lawsuit led by the states of Oklahoma, West Virginia and Louisiana. A Sixth Circuit appeals court panel opined on Mar. 3, 2023, that Congressional changes to the law in 2022 made all of HISA completely constitutional. The plaintiffs in that Sixth Circuit case had already once asked the Supreme Court to hear the case, but were initially denied on June 24, 2024.

In the Eighth Circuit case, the plaintiffs, led by Bill Walmsley, the president of the Arkansas HBPA, and Jon Moss, the executive director of the Iowa HBPA, had asked the Supreme Court to review an opinion that had affirmed a ruling out of a lower federal court in Arkansas denying a preliminary injunction the horsemen had sought to halt HISA and its Anti-Doping and Medication Control (ADMC) program.

All of those appeals court judgments are now vacated.

This story will be updated.

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