Gorsuch, J., concurring in judgment
case and then turned about to testify against Ms. Cochran. In the end, the ALJ fined Ms. Cochran $22,500 and banned her from practicing before the SEC as an accountant for at least five years.
Ms. Cochran responded by asking the full Commission to review the ALJ’s decision. Around the same time, this Court held in an unrelated case that the ALJ who presided over Ms. Cochran’s case had been unconstitutionally appointed. See Lucia v. SEC, 585 U. S. ___, ___ (2018) (slip. op., at 2). Ms. Cochran might have thought that would bring her own case to a close. But the SEC chose instead to take a mulligan. In 2018, the agency vacated the initial decision against Ms. Cochran and assigned a different, properly appointed ALJ to retry the case. So two years after her administrative proceedings began, they began again.
For Ms. Cochran, that was enough. She sued the SEC in federal district court. She sought to enjoin the agency’s proceedings on the ground that all of its ALJs are unconstitutionally insulated from presidential supervision, pointing to this Court’s decisions in Lucia and Free Enterprise Fund. Lucia held that SEC ALJs are inferior officers under the Constitution’s Appointments Clause. 585 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 8). And Free Enterprise Fund held that the President must retain adequate authority to supervise and even remove such officers. 561 U. S., at 492.
In 2019, the district court dismissed Ms. Cochran’s suit without reaching its merits. 2019 WL 1359252 (ND Tex., Mar. 25, 2019). The court did so because it thought Thunder Basin required that result. Id., at *1. A year and a half later, a panel of the Fifth Circuit ran through the Thunder Basin factors and affirmed. 969 F. 3d 507 (2020). A year and a half after that, the en banc Fifth Circuit took another look and largely reversed. 20 F. 4th 194 (2021). Now, more than four years after Ms. Cochran filed her complaint, this Court balances the Thunder Basin factors anew and holds that her case belonged in district court all along. Ante, at
