Actually, that's completely wrong.

As the law was prior to this decision, the SEC had to have good cause to remove someone from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. The ruling was that requiring two levels of good cause between the President and the oversight board was unconstitutional, and now the SEC is able to remove oversight board members directly without requiring good cause. The logic is that this provides sufficient insulation from Presidential control, because the President still requires good cause to remove the SEC people who can remove oversight board members.

tl;dr: The SEC no longer requires good cause to remove oversight board members any more, and the President's power is essentially unchanged.

Wait, isn't this almost the opposite of what the article states? I read it as saying that the ruling removed the restriction that SOX Public Company Accounting Oversight Board members could only be removed for good cause.

In other words, it's now easier for those board members to be removed, as the SEC can just remove them at will.

I haven't read the actual text of the ruling; is the article inconsistent with it?

Thanks. I don't speak the same English that is found within those legal documents.

That's because it's not really meant to be "English"; think of it as a DSL for the law.

I have the hardest time conveying to some clients that legal documents are more like code than prose. I'll try the analogy of a DSL with my dev clients. Thanks.

The analogy of a DSL isn't really an analogy -- it is a DSL. Legalese is a subset of English gramatically speaking, but the entire goal is to minimize ambiguity as much as possible. It really is a DSL.

its really more of a programming language than English these days