CRS Annotated Constitution
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Institutional devices to achieve these principles pervade the Constitution. Bicameralism reduces legislative predominance, while the presidential veto gives to the Chief Magistrate a means of defending himself and of preventing congressional overreaching. The Senate’s role in appointments and treaties checks the President. The courts are assured independence through good behavior tenure and security of compensation, and the judges through judicial review will check the other two branches. The impeachment power gives to Congress the authority to root out corruption and abuse of power in the other two branches. And so on.
Throughout much of our history, the “political branches” have contended between themselves in application of the separation–of–powers doctrine. Many notable political disputes turned on questions involving the doctrine. Inasmuch as the doctrines of separation of powers and of checks and balances require both separation and intermixture,9 the role of the Supreme Court in policing the maintenance of the two doctrines is problematic at best. And, indeed, it is only in the last two decades that cases involving the doctrines have regularly been decided by the Court. Previously, informed understandings of the principles have underlain judicial construction of particular clauses or guided formulation of constitutional common law. That is, the nondelegation doctrine was from the beginning suffused with a separation–of–powers premise,10 and the effective demise of the doctrine as a judicially–enforceable construct reflects the Court’s inability to give any meaningful content to it.11 On the other hand, periodically, the Court has essayed a strong separation position on behalf of the President, sometimes with lack of success,12 sometimes successfully.[p.66]
Following a lengthy period of relative inattention to separation of powers issues, the Court since 197613 has recurred to the doctrine in numerous cases, and the result has been a substantial curtailing of congressional discretion to structure the National Government. Thus, the Court has interposed constitutional barriers to a congressional scheme to provide for a relatively automatic deficit–reduction process because of the critical involvement of an officer with significant legislative ties,14 to the practice set out in more than 200 congressional enactments establishing a veto of executive actions,15 and to the vesting of broad judicial powers to handle bankruptcy cases in officers not possessing security of tenure and salary.16 Contrarily, the highly–debated establishment by Congress of a process by which independent special prosecutors could be established to investigate and prosecute cases of alleged corruption in the Executive Branch was sustained by the Court in a opinion that may presage a judicial approach in separation of powers cases more accepting of some blending of functions at the federal level.17
Important as were the results in this series of cases, the development in the cases of two separate and inconsistent doctrinal approaches to separation of powers issues occasioned the greatest amount of commentary. The existence of the two approaches, which could apparently be employed in the discretion of the Justices, made difficult the prediction of the outcomes of differences over proposals and alternatives in governmental policy. Significantly, however, it appeared that the Court most often used a more strict analysis in cases in which infringements of executive powers were alleged and a less strict analysis when the powers of the other two Branches were concerned. The special prosecutor decision, followed by the decision sustaining the Sentencing Commission, may signal the adoption of a single analysis, the less strict analysis, for all separation of power cases or it may turn out to be but an exception to the Court’s dual doctrinal approach.18[p.67]
While the two doctrines have been variously characterized, the names generally attached to them have been “formalist,” applied to the more strict line, and “functional,” applied to the less strict. The formalist approach emphasizes the necessity to maintain three distinct branches of government through the drawing of bright lines demarcating the three branches from each other determined by the differences among legislating, executing, and adjudicating.19 The functional approach emphasizes the core functions of each branch and asks whether the challenged action threatens the essential attributes of the legislative, executive, or judicial function or functions. Under this approach, there is considerable flexibility in the moving branch, usually Congress acting to make structural or institutional change, if there is little significant risk of impairment of a core function or in the case of such a risk if there is a compelling reason for the action.20
Chadha used the formalist approach to invalidate the legislative veto device by which Congress could set aside a determination by the Attorney General, pursuant to a delegation from Congress, to suspend deportation of an alien. Central to the decision were two conceptual premises. First, the action Congress had taken was leg[p.68]islative, because it had the purpose and effect of altering the legal rights, duties, and relations of persons outside the Legislative Branch, and thus Congress had to comply with the bicameralism and presentment requirements of the Constitution.21 Second, the Attorney General was performing an executive function in implementing the delegation from Congress, and the legislative veto was an impermissible interference in the execution of the laws. Congress could act only by legislating, by changing the terms of its delegation.22 In Bowsher, the Court held that Congress could not vest even part of the execution of the laws in an officer, the Comptroller General, who was subject to removal by Congress because this would enable Congress to play a role in the execution of the laws. Congress could act only by passing other laws.23
On the same day Bowsher was decided through a formalist analysis, the Court in Schor utilized the less strict, functional approach in resolving a challenge to the power of a regulatory agency to adjudicate as part of a larger canvas a state common–law issue, the very kind of issue that Northern Pipeline, in a formalist plurality opinion with a more limited concurrence, had denied to a non–Article III bankruptcy court.24 Sustaining the agency’s power, the Court emphasized “the principle that ‘practical attention to substance rather than doctrinaire reliance on formal categories should inform application of Article III.”’25 It held that in evaluating such a separation of powers challenge, the Court had to consider the extent to which the “essential attributes of judicial power” were reserved to Article III courts and conversely the extent to which the non–Article III entity exercised the jurisdiction and powers normally vested only in Article III courts, the origin and importance of the rights to be adjudicated, and the concerns that drove Congress to depart from the requirements of Article III.26 Bowsher, the Court said, was not contrary, because “[u]nlike Bowsher, this case raises no question of the aggrandizement of congressional power at the expense of a coordinate branch.”27 The test was a balancing[p.69]one, whether Congress had impermissibly undermined the role of another branch without appreciable expansion of its own power.
While the Court, in applying one or the other analysis in separation of powers cases, had never indicated its standards for choosing one analysis over the other, beyond inferences that the formalist approach was proper when the Constitution fairly clearly committed a function or duty to a particular branch and the functional approach was proper when the constitutional text was indeterminate and a determination must be made on the basis of the likelihood of impairment of the essential powers of a branch, the overall results had been a strenuous protection of executive powers and a concomitant relaxed view of the possible incursions into the powers of the other branches. It was thus a surprise, then, when in the independent counsel case, the Court, again without stating why it chose that analysis, utilized the functional standard to sustain the creation of the independent counsel.28 The independent–counsel statute, the Court emphasized, was not an attempt by Congress to increase its own power at the expense of the executive nor did it constitute a judicial usurpation of executive power. Moreover, the Court stated, the law did not “impermissibly undermine” the powers of the Executive Branch nor did it “disrupt the proper balance between the coordinate branches [by] prevent[ing] the Executive Branch from accomplishing its constitutionally assigned functions.”29 Acknowledging that the statute undeniably reduced executive control over what it had previously identified as a core executive function, the execution of the laws through criminal prosecution, through its appointment provisions and its assurance of independence by limitation of removal to a “good cause” standard, the Court nonetheless noticed the circumscribed nature of the reduction, the discretion of the Attorney General to initiate appointment, the limited jurisdiction of the counsel, and the power of the Attorney General to ensure that the laws are faithfully executed by the counsel. This balancing, the Court thought, left the President with sufficient control to ensure that he is able to perform his constitutionally assigned functions.[p.70]
A notably more pragmatic, functional analysis suffused the opinion of the Court when it upheld the constitutionality of the Sentencing Commission.30 Charged with promulgating guidelines binding on federal judges in sentencing convicted offenders, the seven–member Commission, three members of which had to be Article III judges, was made an independent entity in the judicial branch. The President appointed all seven members, the judges from a list compiled by the Judicial Conference, and he could remove from the Commission any member for cause. According to the Court, its separation–of–powers jurisprudence is always animated by the concerns of encroachment and aggrandizement. “Accordingly, we have not hesitated to strike down provisions of law that either accrete to a single Branch powers more appropriately diffused among separate Branches or that undermine the authority and independence of one or another coordinate Branch.”31 Thus, to each of the discrete questions, the placement of the Commission, the appointment of the members, especially the service of federal judges, and the removal power, the Court carefully analyzed whether one branch had been given power it could not exercise or had enlarged its powers impermissibly and whether any branch would have its institutional integrity threatened by the structural arrangement.
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