Consider what this means for Americans. The SEC makes rules, formally and informally, and through enforcement proceedings announces new rules, often retroactively. It has unchecked power to launch investigations that can last years and which lead to a recommendation to itself to commence an in-house prosecution which the commission, unsurprisingly, approves. But since 2010, the same enforcement team that investigates and recommends prosecution becomes the prosecutor before an administrative law judge employed by the very commission that launched the investigation and approved the prosecution in the first place.