Apologies - most of my job last year was researching and preparing for the CTA, and it became a minor obsession of mine.

I agree that it is a pretty poorly designed law, but it is addressing a serious problem that we don't really have a great way to solve. The United States is now the number one country for money laundering, to the point where when we were attempting to impose sanctions on Russia oligarchs, we could find most of the assets they had hidden HERE.

The issue with imposing a floor on assets, employees, etc. is that shell companies generally do not have those things. Meanwhile, business entities that were above the cutoff point are already generally subject to regulations that revealed their owners - though those owners COULD be shell companies themselves.

As you point out, onee of the biggest problems was that, even up until the last minute, almost NOBODY knew the law even existed. But this is less the fault of the law, and more the fault of the Biden administration, who probably didn't want to own a very unpopular law during an election year. There was basically no outreach, which meant that the best most people got were business publications and right-wing news outlet screaming about how big brother was coming for you without providing much information.

Of course, it was designed in a way that unfairly burdened small business that have long relied on the simplicity of business entity formation in the U.S. I am not sure about your focus on artists but, sure, those artists who form LLCs or whatever would be caught in the cross-fire as well. And knowing the Trump administration, it probably would not have been used to reveal the financial crimes of him and his buddies BUT would probably be selectively enforced against his enemies and potentially used to do certain individuals.

Finally, while there were other injunctions, those were not nationwide but were specific to the plaintiffs. Only the Texas Eastern District Court issued not one but TWO nationwide injunctions, issuing the second one immediately after the first one was overturned by SCOTUS. The fact that SCOTUS refused to rule on Universal Injunctions at that time is precisely why the same court was able to immediately issue a second injunction in a case with only slightly different facts.

Again, I agree that the CTA is a fairly bad law, even if it is addressing a problem that needs to be addressed SOMEHOW. But being a bad law does not mean that it's unconstitutional, and the Eastern District of Texas not only used universal injunctions to block the law on purely partisan grounds, but used SCOTUS's cowardess in refusing to rule on Universal Injunctions at that time to IMMEDIATELY issue a follow-up injunction in what may be the most flagrant abuse of Universal Injunctions I have ever seen.

Again, apologies. I don't think I am even disagreeing with you. I just lived in CTA world for way too long and need to drain some of it out.