{"id":334459,"date":"2025-12-08T08:10:13","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T08:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/uncategorized\/when-congress-relies-too-much-on-scotus\/"},"modified":"2025-12-08T08:10:13","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T08:10:13","slug":"when-congress-relies-too-much-on-scotus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=334459","title":{"rendered":"When Congress Relies (Too Much) On SCOTUS"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Oral argument in Trump v. Slaughter<\/em> will be heard on Monday before the Supreme Court, addressing the question of whether the president has the authority to fire and appoint members of what Congress crafted to be \u201cindependent agencies\u201d such as the National Labor Relations Board.<\/p>\n

Wags will argue that since the Constitution vests all executive power in the president, and these bureaucracies exist under the executive branch, of course he does.\u00a0Sarah Isgur puts a bit more flesh on the bones, but essentially agrees, putting it in the context of the Supreme Court using Slaughter<\/em> as an opportunity to retune the relationship between Congress and the presidency.<\/a><\/p>\n

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Our founders would be shocked by the current constitutional order. Not by a presidency that has ballooned beyond recognition \u2014 they were well aware of the threats a power-hungry president could pose \u2014 but by the state of Congress, for not more jealously guarding its power and prestige. They would be confused that so many of its more than 500 members seem to have no further ambition than to act like glorified Instagram influencers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Congressional paralysis didn\u2019t start with Trump, who was far more likely the consequence rather than the cause of the disease. But if Congress is paralyzed, wouldn\u2019t the nation cease to function? Nuh uh, because long before Trump, Congress came up with a magic fix to keep the wheels of government grinding.<\/p>\n

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More than a century ago, Progressive-era politicians were obsessed with the idea that unelected experts could solve many of our thorniest political problems. Congress created independent agencies that were largely shielded from political control and could skip the annoying delays and messy compromises of legislating to create rules and regulations. They would be housed in the executive branch, but they wouldn\u2019t answer to the president.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

What should grab you is that the independent agencies were \u201choused\u201d in the executive branch, even though they were created to be independent of the president. Had they been \u201choused\u201d elsewhere, there would be no issue of the scope of the president\u2019s authority. He\u2019d have none. But for whatever reasons, good, bad or none, Congress put them under the executive umbrella, thus implicating the executive even though Congress was absolutely clear that its intent was to keep the agencies independent of the president.<\/p>\n

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The result has undermined the very theory of our constitutional republic. With all the focus on presidential elections, the truth is that for so much economic and domestic policy \u2014 like energy regulation, labor law, telecommunications, securities regulation \u2014 the president exercises a relatively small slice of that power. The independent agencies decide many of those questions, but voters have no way to hold them directly accountable.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Isgur goes on to provide a cogent explanation of the argument and, more importantly, an argument for why it\u2019s a good thing that the Supreme Court compels Congress to do its job rather than slough it off to bureaucratic agencies or had its authority to legislate over to the president, thereby giving one person way more power than our Constitution intended.<\/p>\n

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But if the president controls agencies completely while they continue to wield sweeping, ill-defined powers, we risk something far worse than independent agencies. Agencies with broad statutory mandates become instruments of presidential policymaking\u2026. Giving presidents this discretion will further concentrate both legislative and executive power in a single person.<\/p>\n

This means that it is critical for the court to rein in Congress\u2019s bad habit of delegating vast and vague powers to the executive branch.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s a strong point, but a point that misses a critical detail that underlies the doctrine of Stare Decisis. When the Supreme Court decided<\/a> Humphrey\u2019s Executor<\/a> in 1935, it validated Congress\u2019 scheme to create independent agencies, bureaucracies, and house them within the executive branch while precluding the president from firing his predecessors\u2019 picks and replacing them with his own. That case involved the Federal Trade Commission and, right or wrong, the Supreme Court gave the congressional scheme a big thumb\u2019s up. And from there, Congress used as many letters of the alphabet as it could muster creating a massive administrative state that ran the machinery of government.<\/p>\n

Part of the initial argument in favor of these agencies was that the world had become more complex and required expertise to manage properly. Congress could create an agency to be staffed by subject matter experts who would implement the purposes for which the agency was created. And this, more or less, worked pretty well for quite a while, until the agency\u2019s mission was either completed and the agency continued on because of Pournelle\u2019s Law, or morphed into fiefdoms of personal power abuse, such as DoEd OCR under Catherine Lhamon.<\/p>\n

Had the Supreme Court not given its stamp of approval to Congress\u2019 scheme way back when, all the alphabet agencies created since, within which massive power to control the functions of government are vested, would not exist. Maybe Congress would have housed the agencies under its own wings, or even better, have not passed the buck to bureaucratic agencies at all to do the job of legislating the Constitution gives Congress.<\/p>\n

While Sarah Isgur may not be wrong about the need to rejigger the lines of separation of power, or even that the fault lies with Congress for having sought a cheap and lazy way to run a nation by putting it in the hands of unelected, unresponsive bureaucrats rather than doing what the Constitution expected of Congress, the fact remains that this vast \u201cindependent\u201d bureaucracy has been created over the past 100 years, and its independence has been blessed by the Supreme Court in Humphrey\u2019s Executor<\/em>.<\/p>\n

There is absolutely nothing to suggest that Congress would have done this knowing that someday far in the future, the Supreme Court would flip on its head and undo the critical key to the agencies that were conveniently, but hardly necessarily, housed within the executive branch, that they be independent of the president. It might not be that the argument isn\u2019t plausible, or even correct, that SCOTUS needs to draw brighter lines of separation between the branches, but that the Supreme Court was very much complicit in the blurring of the lines and the creation of this massive bureaucracy upon which the United States relies, and should just wreak havoc and throw it back to Congress to fix. Congress trusted SCOTUS. Now the Supreme Court needs to own its own fault in the mess.<\/p>\n

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Oral argument in Trump v. Slaughter will be heard on Monday before the Supreme Court, addressing the question of whether the president has the authority to fire and appoint members of what Congress crafted to be \u201cindependent agencies\u201d such as the National Labor Relations Board. 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