火麒麟官网-outline

Jul 20, 2024 Eloise PasachoffAdd a Comment

Eloise Pasachoff

What happens when Congress enacts a permanent commitment to pay for some ongoing activity, but then fails to appropriate the funds necessary to do so? Until recently, this phenomenon was almost unheard of. But contemporary examples abound. For example, Congress failed to fund different two different provisions of the Affordable Care Act that had committed the federal government to pay insurers through the “risk corridors” program and through “cost-sharing reductions”; failed to fund 爬墙,进行访问 who had elected under the Indian Self-Determination and Education Act to provide services that had previously been provided by the federal government; and failed to fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program, a complex cooperative federalism program that is deeply entrenched, albeit in different ways, in states’ health care coverage for children. These examples either reflect or generate inter-branch conflict, implicating the executive branch, and often courts, in what may at first glance seem to be simply an intra-legislative breakdown.

We need a vocabulary to identify and describe this phenomenon and a framework through which to understand and assess it. Matthew Lawrence’s new article Disappropriation does just that.¹

Disappropriation, as Lawrence defines it, is “legislative failure to appropriate funds necessary to honor a government commitment in time to honor that commitment.” Disappropriation results from “the dissonance between Congress’s legislative power and its appropriations power.” In other words, Congress can enact laws committing the federal government to pay for something, but unless it also designates a source of funds, it has not provided an actual appropriation, as required by the Appropriations Clause.

Sometimes, Congress enacts legislation that harmonizes these powers, providing both a commitment to pay and an ongoing permanent appropriation. Think, for example, of Social Security and Medicare. Other times, however, Congress enacts legislation that reflects dissonance between these powers, committing the government to pay but depending for funding on the annual appropriations process. Food stamps and Medicaid, as “appropriated entitlements,” fall into this category.

When the dissonance between Congress’s legislative and appropriations powers results in a disappropriation, or even comes close to it, negative consequences can ensue. For example, those relying on the government’s anticipated payments can face devastating financial losses, with a particularly burdensome disparate impact on less well-capitalized smaller businesses and individuals without the means to survive the delay associated with a legal or political battle over payment. The rule of law also suffers, in that the executive branch is forced to violate a statutory command because it is without the means to do so. Disappropriation can also result in a problematic kind of delegation, where the executive branch is left to pick and choose how to dole out whatever minimal funds exist to support the commitment in the absence of an intelligible principle, because the law never contemplated this kind of executive discretion.

At the same time, as Lawrence points out, strategic exploitation of dissonance between Congress’s legislative and appropriations powers can result in a threat of disappropriation that may have salutary consequences. While permanent commitments shift inter-branch powers towards the executive branch to implement those commitments, annual appropriations pull some of the power back towards Congress. This fact may strengthen Congress’s oversight function. For example, Congress can use the threat of disappropriation to extract executive commitments to produce documents or testify in committee. The threat of disappropriation can also empower blocks in Congress other than party leadership, so that issues of importance to other groups (members of the minority, committees) can rise to salience.

Is there a way to prevent the negative consequences of dissonance that result from an actual disappropriation while retaining the benefits that accrue from strategic exploitation of the threat of disappropriation? Lawrence suggests that there is a category of rules that does just this: rules that “promote durability (the likelihood that a policy will stay in place and so its capacity to engender reliance) but not entrenchment (the difficulty of changing policy for a majority that wishes to do so).” The key, he argues, is to prevent “bargaining failure,” where a disappropriation results because of either “uncertainty surrounding the impact of legislative action or inaction” or “private information about the consequences of disappropriation.”

In light of this goal, he proposes that courts adopt an interpretive presumption against disappropriation of unambiguous legal commitments; welcome lawsuits by civil servants to enforce disappropriation as a superior alternative to resolving questions about legislative standing; offer expedited declaratory (rather than injunctive) relief when there is a dispute about whether a disappropriation has occurred; and “seek to minimize interference with the political branches and reduce uncertainty surrounding the potential impacts of future disappropriations” when considering claims for damages in any individual disappropriations case. Lawrence’s careful analysis of each of these suggestions provides a critical tool for courts and litigants in thinking through the long-term, systemic implications of different paths for resolving discrete legal controversies.

Lawrence’s contribution is a welcome addition to the growing body of administrative law scholarship on federal funding. In a world where inter-branch disputes 爬墙 involve money—building a wall at the southern border with funds that far exceed Congress’s appropriations, placing a hold on aid to Ukraine while asking for investigations of political rivals, limiting oversight over Coronavirus relief—insights like the ones Lawrence offers in this excellent article are vital.

1. I commented on a draft of the article for the 2024 Administrative Law New Scholarship Roundtable.

火麒麟官网-outline

Jun 24, 2024 Jodi Short爬墙

Jodi Short

In Dimensions of Delegation, Cary Coglianese provides a principled account of the U.S. Supreme Court’s nondelegation jurisprudence. Specifically, he reconciles the seemingly idiosyncratic Schechter Poultry case with subsequent applications of the nondelegation doctrine by theorizing a multi-dimensional model of delegated power. In so doing, he provides a template for rethinking nondelegation as a matter of doctrine, rather than as a matter of political theory or political economy, as it is so often treated by partisans on both sides.

I long have puzzled over the jurisprudential treatment of 科学爬墙. The Supreme Court has refused to overrule the case but yet has declined to follow it. More cryptically, even detailed discussions of nondelegation precedent, such as Justice Gorsuch’s recent romp in Gundy v. United States, fail to discuss important nuances of the case—including the fact that the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 (NIRA) contained explicit criteria for when the President could approve a code of fair conduct that would easily pass the modern “intelligible principle” test. The NIRA required that three criteria be met before the President could endorse a code of fair competition: (1) the trade association that proposed the code was “truly representative” of the regulated industry; (2) the code was not “designed to promote monopolies or to eliminate or oppress small enterprises and will not operate to discriminate against them”; and (3) the code would “tend to effectuate the policy of this title.” While this standard leaves the president with broad discretion to choose which codes to approve, it can hardly be suggested that it constrains executive discretion less than delegations subsequently endorsed by the Court without a nod to 科学爬墙—up to and including the statutory charge to many agencies to discharge their delegated authority in the “public interest.”

Instead of wrestling with the doctrinal difficulties this poses, the Court has attempted to reconcile 爬墙,进行访问 with later and more capacious understandings of permissible delegation based on two distinctions. First, the provision of the NIRA challenged in 爬墙 conferred authority on the President to regulate the “entire economy.” Whitman v. American Trucking, 531 U.S. 457, 474 (2001). Second, the challenged provision allowed this authority to be exercised “on the basis of no more precise a standard than stimulating the economy by assuring ‘fair competition.’” Id. I have always found both distinctions dubious. After all, the Clean Air Act regulations challenged in 爬墙 have sweeping impacts on the entire economy, as do regulations under many other broad statutory delegations to agencies that have been upheld by the Court—for instance to restructure securities markets (American Power & Light Co. v. SEC, 329 U.S. 90 (1946)) or to regulate communications broadcast over the nation’s airwaves (National Broadcasting Co. v. United States, 319 U.S. 190 (1943)). And “fair competition” is no less precise a standard than the “public interest.”

Coglianese makes sense of all this by shifting the lens through which we view delegations. He starts by returning to constitutional first principles: the thing that Congress may not delegate to another branch is its vested legislative authority. The novel contribution of the article is to develop a new way of ascertaining when delegated authority is, indeed, legislative, and thus may not be delegated. Coglianese argues that we should conceptualize legislative authority much like we conceptualize property: as a bundle of sticks, or “distinct features which together are constitutive of that authority.” Applying this approach, it becomes clear that the intelligibility of the principle constraining delegated discretion—the current touchstone of the nondelegation doctrine—is but one of the sticks in the bundle comprising legislative authority. Even when delegated authority is not guided by clear statutory standards, it may be circumscribed on other dimensions. The constitutionality of a delegation thus depends on an assessment of all these dimensions.

Coglianese’s close reading of nondelegation precedent reveals that the constitutional permissibility of statutory delegations of authority to the executive branch is not—and never has been—solely about the intelligibility of the principle guiding the administrator’s discretion. Rather, it has been about the overall “shape” and “size” of the authority a statute grants to an executive officer and whether this coincides with the “shape” and “size” of a legislative power granted to Congress by the Constitution.

Coglianese argues that courts have assessed the “shape” and “size” of a delegated authority by reference to six key characteristics, or “six degrees of delegation.” Consistent with the reigning intelligible principle test, one dimension is the statutory basis for decision-making by the administrator, or the extent to which clearly stated standards guide the administrator’s discretion in exercising delegated authority. Coglianese’s analysis surfaces five additional dimensions that have been relevant to the Court’s nondelegation analysis. First, the Court has noted the nature of the statutorily authorized action—specifically, whether the statute authorizes the agency to take enforcement actions or make binding rules. Second, the Court has attended to the range of regulated targets, for instance, whether the delegated authority is over a single industry or a broader swath of the nation’s economy. Third, the Court has considered the scope of activities the agency is authorized to regulate, for example, limiting air pollution or regulating the fairness of business practices of any kind. Fourth, the Court has been interested in the degree of sanctioning power delegated to the agency, including both the magnitude of penalties the agency is authorized to impose and whether they may be imposed directly on private businesses or individuals. Finally, the Court has considered the extent of required process an agency must observe and the extent of constraint this imposes on the agency’s ability to exercise its delegated authority. Where a statutory delegation of authority falls on each of these dimensional spectrums determines whether it is legislative in nature and thus constitutionally impermissible.

Coglianese’s multi-dimensional approach goes a long way to providing a doctrinally coherent account of the Court’s nondelegation jurisprudence. It helps explain, for instance, why the NIRA’s delegation of authority to approve codes of fair competition is more constitutionally problematic than, for instance, the statutory delegation of authority to the FCC to allocate broadcast spectrum in the “public interest.” While the NIRA standards guiding code approval are arguably more “intelligible” than the “public interest” standard governing the FCC, the NIRA delegation of authority falls comparatively short on the other dimensions of delegation. The NIRA covered an unlimited range of regulatory targets, while the FCC regulates a single industry. The NIRA allowed the authorization of codes governing an unbounded range of business practices, while the FCC regulates a more limited set of practices by its regulated community. NIRA authorized criminal penalties for violation of approved codes, while the FCC has much more limited enforcement powers. Under the NIRA, the President’s code approval decisions were unconstrained by any formal procedures, while the FCC is constrained by numerous procedural requirements, including administrative adjudication in many cases.

Beyond its immediate aims, Coglianese’s multi-dimensional approach also provides a useful way of thinking through the “major questions” thicket that the Court has allowed to grow up around its ambivalent streams of nondelegation and deference jurisprudence. Indeed, Justice Kavanaugh explicitly linked the nondelegation doctrine and the “major questions” doctrine in a recent statement respecting denial of certiorari in Paul v. United States. After praising Justice Gorsuch’s “scholarly analysis of the Constitution’s nondelegation doctrine” in Gundy, Justice Kavanaugh suggested that perhaps there should be a “nondelegation principle for major questions.” Coglianese’s approach explains why this would be just as myopic as the “intelligible principle” test: whether a delegation authorizes an agency to address “major questions” focuses exclusively on one dimension of delegated authority—scope—without considering holistically the other dimensions that give a delegation its shape and size and determine whether it impermissibly coincides with legislative power. To be sure, under Coglianese’s approach, the scope of delegated authority is relevant to determining whether an impermissible delegation of legislative power has occurred. However, sweeping delegations of authority over major questions may nonetheless be constitutional if they are constrained on other dimensions, including clear statutory standards and rigorous decision-making procedures.

In sum, Coglianese provides the first principled account of the widely misunderstood nondelegation doctrine as a doctrine. This is a welcome corrective to the present debate, characterized by histrionic appeals to resurrect the “Constitution in exile” and dire warnings about the gutting of the administrative state. His approach invites partisans on all sides to look past the political rhetoric and to take nondelegation doctrine seriously if it is to be revived.

Editor’s note: For another review of Dimensions of Delegation, also published today, please see: Richard Pierce, Reinvigorating the Non-Delegation Doctrine, JOTWELL (June 24, 2024).

火麒麟官网-outline

Jun 24, 2024 Richard PierceAdd a Comment

Richard Pierce

Cary Coglianese’s article, Dimensions of Delegation, is timely. The Court has invoked the non-delegation doctrine as the basis to invalidate a statute only once 85 years ago. The only statute that the Court has ever invalidated based on application of the non-delegation doctrine actually delegated extraordinarily broad power to private participants in markets rather than to an agency. During the past year, however, five Supreme Court Justices have made it clear that they are open to the possibility of relying on the non-delegation doctrine as the basis to hold statutes unconstitutional. Even many scholars who have long opposed attempts to reinvigorate the non-delegation doctrine have become more receptive to that possibility in today’s conditions.

A recent online symposium published by The Regulatory Review illustrates the state of the debate. Jonathan Adler and Chris Walker introduced the symposium with their excellent essay: “Delegation and Time.” They made the point that the increasing inability or unwillingness of Congress to amend broadly worded statutes that confer regulatory power on agencies has created a situation in which agencies are forced to apply statutes that are so old that they were drafted when no one could have anticipated the uses to which they are now being put. Thus, for instance, the FCC is using the Communications Act of 1934 as the basis to regulate the internet and the EPA is using the Clean Air Act of 1970 as the basis to take the actions required to mitigate climate change. The result increasingly is a series of agency actions that Congress never contemplated and that might not be consistent with the values of the Congress that enacted the old statute, the present Congress, or the people.

Other contributors to that symposium identified the hundreds of statutes that confer seemingly unlimited “emergency” powers on the President as candidates for application of a newly invigorated non-delegation doctrine. President Trump has relied on the National Emergencies Act of 1976 as the basis for his reallocation of the funds that Congress refused to appropriate to build a wall along the southern border. Senator and Presidential candidate Sanders has stated his intention to rely on the “emergency” powers conferred on the President in various statutes to support expenditure of trillions of dollars to mitigate climate change.

The Regulatory Review is published by the Penn Program on Regulation. That program is run by Cary Coglianese, the author of “Dimensions of Delegation.” Before the Justices take any action to follow through on their stated intention to reinvigorate the non-delegation doctrine, they should study with care both the symposium that Professor Coglianese’s Center published and his article.

半夜爱爬墙的个人资料 - 摩托车论坛 - 中国摩托迷网 将摩旅 ...:2021-6-13 · 半夜爱爬墙的个人资料 ,摩托车论坛 设为首页 收藏本站 开启辅助访问 登录 注册 首页 论坛 选车new！国产跨骑 踏板 弯梁 国外品牌 维修改装 色魔驴行 摄影 电动 交易 地方版 | 京 津 沪 渝 晋 冀 豫 湘 粤 桂 鄂 鲁 琼 川 滇 黔 赣 浙 闽 ...

Professor Coglianese begins by explaining how courts and scholars have traditionally decided whether a statutory delegation of power is constitutional by focusing exclusively on the presence or absence of an “intelligible principle” that a court can enforce to keep the agency’s exercise of discretion within boundaries set by Congress. He argues persuasively that courts should also consider the nature of the action the agency has taken, the extent of the power that Congress has delegated to the agency, the scope of the activities that the agency has been authorized to regulate, the nature and degree of sanctions that the agency is empowered to impose, the quality and quantity of the reasoning and evidentiary support for the agency action, and the nature and extent of the process the agency used to make the decision to act.

Professor Coglianese then devotes eighteen pages to a detailed discussion of the many ways in which courts have long enforced the non-delegation doctrine once we recognize that it has many dimensions. He urges courts and scholars to abandon the simplistic and futile search for an “intelligible principle” that limits agency exercises of discretion. He argues that courts can ensure that Congress and agencies act in ways that are consistent with the Constitution by continuing to apply the many administrative law doctrines that respond effectively to the multi-dimensional nature of the potential constitutional problem that can be created by broad delegations of power to agencies.

Editor’s note: For another review of Dimensions of Delegation, also published today, please see Jodi Short, 6 Degrees of Delegation, JOTWELL (June 24, 2024).

火麒麟官网-outline

爬墙,进行访问 Kristin HickmanAdd a Comment

Kristin Hickman

The cooperation of public and private actors to achieve public goals is not new. More than 80 years ago, Louis Jaffe lauded the longstanding and substantial involvement of private groups in the regulatory sphere. The scope, range, and legal significance of coordination between the public and private spheres have expanded since then. Modern governance is a complicated web of relationships between public and private actors, command and cooperative structures, and hard law versus soft guidance. A robust academic literature assigns different labels to this phenomenon: privatization, public/private partnerships, and new governance, to name just a few.

By necessity, these arrangements entail the exercise of policymaking discretion by private actors, to varying degrees depending upon the scenario. The result is a diffusion of governmental power that neither Congress nor the courts are likely to roll back substantially. With 外贸公司擅自使用非法定信道被罚-月光博客:2021-6-14 · 近日，海宁警方侦办一起外贸公司擅自使用非法定信道进行国际联网的案件。 2021年5月，民警在对海宁市外贸企业走访过程中，发现一企业存在使用“翻墙软件”访问境外网站的情况，经查，该企业由于业务需要，于今年4月由员工张珊（化名）通过网络购买、注册“翻墙软件”，并多次使用访问 ..., 爬墙,进行访问 identifies and explores yet another way in which government relies on private actors—by looking to large corporations to serve as “enforcer firms” or “gatekeepers” ensuring compliance with federal law.

Van Loo begins his analysis with a survey of “prior narratives of third-party private regulation.” Private firms independently monitor other firms for compliance with the law in order to protect their own interests: e.g., banks monitoring their borrowers for illegal activity that might impair the value of collateral, or insurance companies monitoring their insureds for legal noncompliance that might trigger insurance payouts. Self-regulatory organizations like the New York Stock Exchange police the actions of their members to protect the reputation of their industries. Legislatures pass laws imposing vicarious liability and information disclosure requirements, authorizing citizen suits, and protecting or even rewarding whistleblowers to encourage private enforcement of the law. Legislators and agencies also mandate private enforcement when they require certification from accredited, third-party inspectors before a business can operate.

Van Loo argues that the scholarly literature lacks “an examination of mandates that explicitly direct regulated entities to serve as enforcers.” To fill that void, he offers case studies based on “[t]he ten largest companies operat[ing] in four main industries: information technology, banking, pharmaceuticals, and oil,” asserting that these case studies “demonstrate how administrative agencies, after receiving authority from Congress, have delegated” enforcement authority to these private actors.

For the technology sector, Van Loo points to FTC third-party oversight orders against Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Lenovo, for example requiring Facebook to audit the security and privacy practices of app developers for the purpose of protecting consumer data privacy. For the banking sector, Van Loo documents CFPB lawsuits, and subsequent settlement agreements, holding banks like JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo responsible for the deceptive acts or practices of third-party call centers, debt collectors, software developers, and real estate lawyers with which the banks do business, thereby forcing the banks to police the behavior of those third parties. For the pharmaceutical industry, Van Loo identifies an expansive regime of FDA regulations, guidance statements, and warning letters explicitly requiring drug companies to maintain quality control units “responsible for approving or rejecting drug products manufactured, processed, packed, or held under contract by another company,” thus requiring the drug companies’ to monitor not only the “output” but also the “inputs”—i.e., materials and ingredients—of those third-party contractors.

番茄免费爬墙加速器:2021-6-11 · 您可众使用免费VPN Tomato取消阻止任何站点，应用程序或游戏。绕过政府的审查和地理限制，众从任何地方访问社交网络，例如Facebook，Twitter，YouTube，Snapchat，PUBG，Free Fire，Twitch等，或任何其他被阻止的网站！

Van Loo next turns his attention to the ways in which large corporations perform this new regulatory role. In particular, he describes a system of private regulation through contract drafting. At the suggestion (or instruction) of federal agencies, enforcer firms incorporate into written agreements with third-party contractors their own expectations regarding compliance with regulatory requirements, as well as penalties for noncompliance. Federal regulators in turn monitor the efforts of the enforcer firms to monitor third-party compliance those contractual requirements and the law more generally. In this way, the federal government deputizes and delegates enforcement authority to a small number of large, private corporations.

半夜爱爬墙的个人资料 - 摩托车论坛 - 中国摩托迷网 将摩旅 ...:2021-6-13 · 半夜爱爬墙的个人资料 ,摩托车论坛 设为首页 收藏本站 开启辅助访问 登录 注册 首页 论坛 选车new！国产跨骑 踏板 弯梁 国外品牌 维修改装 色魔驴行 摄影 电动 交易 地方版 | 京 津 沪 渝 晋 冀 豫 湘 粤 桂 鄂 鲁 琼 川 滇 黔 赣 浙 闽 ...

Irrespective of whether one favors or disfavors more government involvement in corporate activity, Van Loo posits unintended consequences and economic tradeoffs. Mandated third-party governance by large corporations will alter corporate structures by incentivizing those firms to stop outsourcing functions to third parties and instead to bring more activities back in-house or to purchase third-party service providers outright. The compliance departments of large corporate firms have grown dramatically in recent decades, expanding the regulatory state bureaucracy and resources dedicated to regulatory compliance substantially; Goldman Sachs employs twice as many compliance personnel as the CFPB, and Facebook’s compliance reviewers far outnumber the total employees of the FTC, Facebook’s main regulator. Yet, we have little evidence to evaluate whether or under what circumstances enforcement firms are an effective and efficient regulatory compliance tool.

Van Loo raises practical concerns about overlapping jurisdiction, strategic shirking, cosmetic box checking, and other efficacy issues. Moreover, accountability is a problem. Government agencies may monitor the regulatory enforcement activities of large corporations, but courts have few mechanisms and seemingly little role to play in holding enforcer firms accountable for their actions in this regard.

Van Loo’s article comes at a potentially pivotal time in administrative law jurisprudence and scholarship. We are in the midst of the latest round of debate over whether the regulatory state has become too powerful and needs to be curtailed by the courts. In Lucia v. SEC and 爬墙, the Supreme Court has taken up issues concerning the constitutionality of how agencies are structured. The last year has seen opinions in Gundy v. United States and United States v. Paul representing a majority of the Justices signaling concerns about congressional delegations of legislative power to agencies and the desire to adopt a more robust nondelegation doctrine to curtail such actions. Yet, at this moment of national discussion and debate, and notwithstanding a robust and longstanding academic literature on the topic, the extensive delegation of regulatory power from agencies to nongovernmental actors has received much less attention. Perhaps Van Loo’s article will spark further discussion.

火麒麟官网-outline

Apr 30, 2024 Jack BeermannAdd a Comment

Jack Beermann

When a President who campaigned on a deregulatory platform assumes office, the question immediately arises whether, in light of the unlikelihood of significant statutory assistance by Congress, the new administration will be able to achieve substantial deregulation on its own. In most contexts, agencies looking to ease regulatory burdens have essentially two options: they can engage in a reappraisal of the regulatory record (like the Reagan administration’s failed attempt to rescind the passive restraint requirement for new automobiles), or they can reinterpret the statute or statutes underlying a regulatory program (such as the same administration’s successful reform of the regulation of “stationary sources” of air pollutants), or both.

In the most exotic permutation of the latter method, employed more by the Trump administration than any previous administration, agencies have occasionally argued that their predecessors lacked statutory power to regulate as they did, leaving them no legal choice but to abandon a prior administration’s regulatory program. In Agency Statutory Abnegation in the Deregulatory Playbook, William Buzbee describes, analyzes, and dissects this “statutory abnegation” strategy, and persuasively illustrates that it has been and is likely to remain unsuccessful without major changes to basic principles of administrative law.

Buzbee provides a clear and succinct definition of statutory abnegation: “Acting against a backdrop of unchanged statutory law, an agency reexamines its powers under that law. In a break from past agency power claims and, usually, related actions, the agency newly declares that it no longer has authority it previously asserted. This is an act of agency ‘abnegation’—self-denial of authority—because, without any statutory or judicially mandated change, the agency is denying itself statutory power previously claimed.” (P. 1518.) Examples of statutory abnegation that Buzbee describes include the EPA’s conclusion, under the George W. Bush administration, that it lacked previously asserted statutory authority to regulate greenhouse gases and among many from the Trump administration, its repudiation of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan based exclusively on its view that the CPP “exceed[ed] the EPA’s statutory authority.”

怎么样用谷歌浏览器爬墙-ZOL问答:10条回答：【推荐答案】SSH配合Chrome轻松爬墙的过程，方便更多还不知道使用SSH的盆友使用，老鸟绕道。。首先大致了解一下什么是SSH:百度百科要实现SSH配合Chrome伕理上网，除了要有能够使用的SSH账号，还需要一些工具：1.GoogleChr

Why judicial rejection? Buzbee illustrates quite effectively that an administration’s deregulatory fervor is likely to be met by reviewing courts doing what they have always done: namely, require agencies to offer well-considered, rational judgments that take into account “the science, data, empirical assessments, and old and new legal reasoning relevant to evaluating the policy shift.” (P. 1515.) These considerations are the bread and butter of judicial review, and administrations ignore them at their peril. Instead, abnegation arguments have often been founded upon “slender legal reasoning, paid little attention to statutory criteria, avoided past rationales, and shown little or no engagement with on-the-ground impacts of the old and new policy choices.” (P. 1515.) As Buzbee so eloquently concludes, “well-established doctrine appropriately rewards actions reflecting respect for multiple sources of political accountability. As courts have found, presidential edicts are inadequate justifications for inexpert agency rollbacks that dodge full engagement with congressional requirements, do not analyze underlying science and data, and fail to grapple with past reasoning and regulatory contestation.” (P. 1563.) For courts to approve the Trump administration’s abnegation arguments, courts would have to abandon these bedrock aspects of administrative law.

Why then, Buzbee wonders out loud, have agencies in the Trump administration been employing “bare statutory abnegation” in so many instances? Although the question invites speculation, Buzbee offers what I find to be a plausible and persuasive account: Presidents and their appointees may be more interested in scoring political points than in actually achieving substantial deregulation. That the Trump administration has been challenging agency action at a record pace may be less salient to the administration’s supporters than dramatic announcements of new deregulatory initiatives such as the repudiation of the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, the toughening of criteria for student loan forgiveness, and the rescission of programs extending deferred action on deportation to “dreamers” (undocumented immigrants who arrived in the United States as children). Further, making new rules based on statutory interpretation is likely to be quicker and easier than rulemaking based on a detailed factual and technical record, allowing the administration to score its political points much more quickly.

One virtue of Buzbee’s article is that it anticipates virtually every consideration relevant to understanding and evaluating the statutory abnegation strategy. I want to focus on three of the issues Buzbee discusses. First, Buzbee shows that the Trump administration may have fallen into the same trap that befell the Reagan administration when it rescinded the passive restraint requirement—the temptation to conceive of deregulation as like an agency decision not to act in the first place, which would be reviewed under an exceedingly deferential standard of judicial review. It is black letter administrative law that deregulation by rulemaking is subject to the same standard of judicial review as is applied to agency adoption of a new rule increasing regulatory burdens. Second, one of the most confusing aspects of the Chevron doctrine may also be at work here—the notion that courts do not defer to agency decisions on “pure questions of statutory interpretation.” When an agency’s entire justification for a deregulatory action is that a statute unambiguously requires it, courts are tempted to assume their traditional role as the final arbiters of statutory meaning, i.e. the ever-expanding Chevron step one. Finally, Buzbee establishes that the Fox Television decision that governs judicial review of agency policy changes is excruciatingly ambiguous on the justification required to validate a significant policy change, leading agencies to believe, perhaps erroneously, that they will receive great deference whenever they change course.

为何不建议使用“免费爬墙加速器”？:2021-5-6 · 依附爬墙App获得流量的游戏应用、广告等也被泼冷水。这不会影响国内外企业和广大用户开展正常的跨境访问互联网，众及合法依规开展各类经营活动。整顿主要是对那些无证经营、不符合规范的进行清理，依法依规的企业和个人是不受影响的。

火麒麟官网-outline

Apr 2, 2024 Miriam SeifterAdd a Comment

Miriam Seifter

The field of Administrative Law typically focuses on federal agencies, but there are tens of thousands of state and local agencies that administer the law on matters of tremendous consequence. As Nestor Davidson recently put it, the field’s “myopic federal focus obscures a massive, submerged, and surprisingly vibrant domain of administration that exists at the local-government level.” Thinking about these other levels of administration can both illuminate the actual workings of important policy areas and prompt fruitful reflection on recurring administrative-law questions.

爬墙’s thought-provoking new article, Rethinking Police Rulemaking, accomplishes both of these worthy goals. One significant species of local administration, she reminds us, is policing. There are close to 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, and they make a range of policy choices of great consequence, including regarding the use of force, stop and frisk, enforcement priorities, and “the persistent creep of the surveillance state.” In Rethinking, Ponomarenko brings fresh perspective to debates over how to oversee police agencies. In particular, she challenges a longstanding idea that an administrative-law mainstay, notice-and-comment rulemaking, is the most promising solution for holding police more accountable.

In one sense, the vintage of this debate reveals that policing has not been overlooked as a species of state and local administration at all; scholars have been discussing the use of notice-and-comment rulemaking for agencies since the 1960s. Yet as Ponomarenko observes, rulemaking is just one tool in the administrative law toolbox. And “despite more than five decades of scholarship devoted to making the case for police rulemaking, there has been very little attention paid to how rulemaking would actually work in practice.” In Rethinking, Ponomarenko gives us reason to believe that rulemaking is a poor fit for policing’s ills and provides a sketch of more promising solutions.

The article begins by synthesizing the substantial existing literature on police rulemaking—both its origins and a more recent “rulemaking renaissance.” Ponomarenko then identifies four types of problems that beset the rulemaking idea. First, and “perhaps the biggest challenge,” police departments are not required to make rules and have little incentive to adopt them. Unlike other rulemaking agencies, which adopt rules to make it easy to govern the public, police enforce rules made by others; they lack authority to alter or even formally clarify the law themselves. The rules we care about for police are the rules they make to govern themselves. And for many reasons, police agencies lack incentives to adopt internal rules on challenging topics (like enforcement discretion, which would likely draw undesired attention).

All of that suggests that if we want police rulemaking, legislatures will have to mandate it. But that leads to a second set of challenges: how could legislatures isolate the policy choices that should be made through a rulemaking process? It’s coherent to talk about rules for decisions that involve concrete steps, like the adoption of new surveillance technologies. But most of the problems associated with policing, like the use of enforcement discretion or force, are part of gradually evolving practices for which it will be hard to specify either the trigger for rulemaking or the desired content of ensuing rules. Third, and related, it may be difficult for legislatures to determine the types of decisions that would benefit from public input, given that most of the prime topics for police rulemaking are internal rules (which, at the federal level, would typically be exempt from the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice-and-comment process).

Finally, and to my mind most fundamentally, Ponomarenko argues it is just not clear that rulemaking will provide the accountability benefits its proponents seek. The problem areas in policing contain few digestible “referendum moments” conducive to public input. Even on discrete questions, the public is at a significant information disadvantage when trying to assess what sorts of police rules will generate desired policy outcomes in communities. A Department of Justice , for example, ultimately concluded that the New Orleans Police Department’s lax secondary employment policy led to poor police service—but that connection is far from self-evident to a lay person. This discussion may resonate for administrative law scholars beyond the policing context, as we consider how much of the critique is not unique to policing. Rethinking’s take on the realistic limitations of public input, for one, resonates with existing concerns about rulemaking itself.

Part III of Rethinking considers alternatives to rulemaking to address governance problems in police departments. At least for large jurisdictions, Ponomarenko proposes “regulatory intermediaries” like police commissions or inspectors general. Building on the agency design literature, Ponomarenko posits that such intermediaries might help to solve the problems of incentives, information, and representative legitimacy that impede police accountability at present. Indeed, a few large cities have Inspectors General for police agencies in recent years.

One particularly praiseworthy aspect of Ponomarenko’s account is her clarity regarding what we know and what we don’t about administrative interventions. Like her analysis of rulemaking, her examination of regulatory intermediaries embraces the complexity and tradeoffs that such interventions might entail. While generally supporting the intermediary approach, she notes that cities that have established regulatory intermediaries have done so without a clear theory of what they should achieve, and that “the reality is that we know far too little about what it would in fact take for such an entity to be effective.” To build such knowledge, Ponomarenko suggests a research agenda for the study of police intermediaries that would assess their ability to (1) generate useful information about shortfalls in police practices; (2) supply the missing incentives to address those shortfalls; and (3) engage with affected stakeholders in reaching decisions.

One final insight in the piece is worth noting. Inspectors general and the like may not be realistic in small jurisdictions. There, Ponomarenko suggests that solutions might come from the state level. States already play a role in regulating policing—commissions on Police Office Standards and Training already set minimum standards for police training—and statewide entities could be given more active roles. A statewide audit bureau, for example, could mirror the work of inspectors general in jurisdictions where it wouldn’t make sense to have one. She grants that “states have not been particularly hospitable grounds for police reform,” but reminds us that prescriptions must be comparative, and “ordinary local politics has not been particularly conducive to effective regulation of policing either.”

Rethinking Police Rulemaking is an important read not just for policing scholars, but also for administrative law and state and local government scholars. For administrative law scholars, the piece’s fresh analysis of the potential and limitations of both rulemaking and regulatory intermediaries deserves attention. For state and local government scholars, the piece provides a deep dive into the available remedies for governance dilemmas that extend beyond policing. Spanning all of these fields, Ponomarenko’s article is an insightful, generative contribution, and I liked it a lot.

火麒麟官网-outline

科学爬墙 Anne Joseph O'ConnellAdd a Comment

Anne Joseph O'Connell

Administrative law commentary often fixates on the White House—specifically, on presidential directives to agencies. Presidents, however, often wield more control by picking agency leaders, as David Barron smartly pointed out over a decade ago. In the years since, while legal scholars have paid considerable attention to judicial picks, they have largely neglected agency appointees. Ryan Scoville’s Unqualified Ambassadors provides a deeply needed look at the people selected to lead our embassies abroad. Recently, we have seen how confirmed ambassadors can take on critical roles beyond their embassies: President Trump named the confirmed ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, acting Director of National Intelligence last month.

Scoville compiled (and has made freely available online) an astounding amount of information on close to 2000 ambassadorial nominees to sovereign countries from 1980 to 2018. These ambassadors serve both as diplomats and as CEOs of U.S. efforts in a particular country. Despite considerable presidential control in this area, Scoville argues that these leaders “remain as vital contributors to a successful foreign policy.” He obtained some information from the Obama Administration, which, starting in 2014, publicly provided “certificates of demonstrated competency” for each ambassadorial nominee. (Congress then codified the practice.) For the remaining 34 years of data, Scoville turned to FOIA requests. He is the rare scholar who has sued to get needed information for his article.

From this trove of certificates and the Congressional Record, Scoville tracked campaign contributions and developed a range of qualification measures (language ability, experience in the country and region, foreign policy expertise from federal government jobs or the military, and leadership skills) for these bilateral ambassadorships. Among many interesting findings, he determined:

• In his first two years, more than 40 percent of President Trump’s appointees came from outside the Foreign Service. Despite congressional pressure in recent decades for more skilled diplomats, President Trump has appointed more political nominees than each of the other modern presidents (for example, President Obama allotted 30 percent of his appointments to non-career diplomats).
• Political ambassadors were more than fourteen times more likely than career picks to have contributed campaign funds to their nominating president.
• While more than a quarter of all political nominees provided no such campaign contributions, about 11 percent of nominees between 2001 and 2016 bundled funds for their nominating president.
• 2021，哪些家具可“上墙”？_鲁班园:2021-6-15 · 欢迎访问 鲁班园 咨询热线：025-86809339 帮助 关于我伔 新手上路 专家投稿 使用条款 网站地图 商业推广 首页 家具材料 制造设备 工艺技术 鲁班专家 鲁班商城 ...
• Language ability is in short supply, particularly outside Western Europe, South America, and Africa. Considering non-English speaking countries, only 46 percent of career picks (and just 28 percent of political picks) had some relevant language ability.
• Within-country experience is also largely lacking, with just 17 percent of all nominees having experience in or involving the assigned country. While in-country experience is low among career nominees (19 percent), it is worse among political picks (12 percent).
• Regional expertise was much better, however—with 61 percent of all picks having prior regional experience in or involving the relevant region. Here, careerists far outperformed their political counterparts, 86 to 24 percent.
• From the qualification metrics developed in the article, All but 10 percent had some organizational leadership skills (96 percent of career nominees versus 76 percent of political nominees, where law firm partnerships did not count).

Drawing on the State Department Inspector General’s (IG) reports and other sources, Scoville worries about the “plausible consequences” of more campaign contributors and less skilled ambassadors—including “the United States … encounter[ing] greater difficulty executing foreign relations” and “the marginalization of diplomacy itself.”

To stave off these effects, Scoville proposes several reforms. First, he wants Congress to impose some statutory qualifications for these critical posts. Scoville proposes mandates on language skills and other relevant experience, and a restriction on campaign donors. Unlike many Senate-confirmed jobs with “reasonable and relevant” qualification mandates, the Constitution includes explicit references to ambassadors, raising tricky constitutional questions as to whether statutory mandates are compatible with the Appointments Clause, which the article deftly examines. Of course, donor restrictions raise their own concerns even if imposed, as Scoville suggests, on diplomatic passports or salaries and not on the President’s choices themselves.

Second, Scoville calls for the Senate to change its rules to impose a longer waiting period and to require hearings for ambassador nominations to foreign states. Finally, he demands more transparency. Specifically, he wants the certificates of demonstrated competency to contain more relevant information (and to be disclosed with nominees’ financial forms in one place) and for the State Department’s IG to conduct and publicize regular reviews of these foreign posts.

小伙当“蜘蛛侠”徒手爬3楼求复合，拘10天 注目无锡 东林书院 ...:2021-10-12 · 民警对李某进行了批评教育，李某也答应不再骚扰胡女士。 没想到，胡女士刚回到家中，李某又故技重施，爬墙入室，再次纠缠胡女士，还与胡女士室友产生矛盾。民警再次接到报警后赶到现场，将李某再次带回派出所审查。

第350章 这小子真的是个人吗？ - 第二页_王爷，王妃又爬墙 ...:王爷，王妃又爬墙跑了！是作者三二一所著的架空穿越小说,红颜书吧提供王爷，王妃又爬墙跑了！无弹窗免费阅读.本页面是王爷，王妃又爬墙跑了！ 第350章 这小子真的是个人吗？ - 第二页

火麒麟官网-outline

Feb 25, 2024 Richard MurphyAdd a Comment

Richard Murphy

Maybe you have been wondering, for one reason or another, just what the “executive power” entails. If so, you are in luck, for Professor Julian Davis Mortenson has an answer for you in two magisterial, deeply researched articles that also happen to be compelling reads: Article II Vests Executive Power, Not the Royal Prerogative, and its sequel, The Executive Power Clause. It turns out that “The executive power meant the power to execute. Period.” (Executive Power, P. 5.)

It will come as no news to readers of this website that, about a quarter of a millennium ago, Article II of the Constitution vested the “executive power” of the United States in the president. And ever since that time, Americans have been arguing about just what this “executive power” entails. In truth, it seems this debate is likely to last as long as the Republic does—which suggests that the debate sometimes says as much about the debaters as their subject.

Much of this debate has revolved around the scope of congressional power to protect the independence of administrators from the president via for-cause restrictions on termination. In recent decades, the core argument against such restrictions, familiar from cases such as Morrison and Free Enterprise Fund, is that they may unduly interfere with the president’s ability to exercise the executive power and to carry out the duty to “take care that the laws of the United States be faithfully executed.” The Supreme Court will take yet another run at this unitary-executive problem during the current term in Seila Law LLC v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in which the Court will decide whether Congress infringed too much on presidential authority by imposing a for-cause restriction on removal of the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. (Spoiler: Things are not looking so good for the director’s independence.)

This debate regarding agency independence implicates the most obvious element of the “executive power,” which is the power to implement (i.e., execute) legislative commands enacted by Congress or embedded in the Constitution. A reader unscarred by legal training might be forgiven for thinking that Article II’s Vesting Clause grants the president only this enforcement power. This reader would be in good company insofar as there have been presidents, justices, and scholars who have shared this understanding. (Article II, P. 11.) On this view, which Professor Mortenson refers to as the “Law Execution” thesis, the president’s executive power is an empty vessel into which somebody else must pour the content by legislative action. (Executive Power, P. 4.)

Many prominent scholars, as well as a president, some justices, and some legislators, have subscribed to a much more expansive understanding of the executive power as embracing a grab-bag of powers and privileges exercised by the British Crown at the time of the Constitution’s drafting. (爬墙P.11.) This view is commonly referred to as the “Vesting Clause” thesis, but Professor Mortenson calls it the “Royal Residuum” thesis on the ground that this name provides a more accurate description. Adoption of the Royal Residuum thesis yields a considerably more potent and king-like president with powers over national security and foreign affairs that Congress cannot constitutionally override. A president convinced she possesses such powers might, for example, conclude that statutory limits on wiretaps cannot restrict efforts to protect national security or that statutory restrictions on torture are unconstitutional. (Article II, P. 2.) So the choice between the Law Execution and Royal Residuum theses is, one might say, a big deal.

The title of the first of his two companion pieces gives its game away: Article II Vests Executive Power, Not the Royal Prerogative. Professor Mortenson explains that his methodology was “motivated by a metaphor: standing in front of James Madison’s bookshelf and pulling texts off the wall to ask, what was the foundation on which the Founders were building?” (Article II, P. 20.) To this end, his research relied “on more than a thousand contemporaneous published texts by hundreds of commentators, with a research methodology that involved reviewing every instance of the word root ‘exec-’ and reading most of the texts cover to cover with the topic of presidential power squarely in mind.” (Article II, P. 19.) Usual suspects, such as Blackstone, Bracton, Locke, Hobbes, and many others, duly appear, as do a legion of more obscure authors. Based on this research, Professor Mortenson concludes that, at the time of the Constitution’s drafting, political and legal discourse consistently used the term “royal prerogative” to refer to “the basket of non-statutory powers held by the British Crown.” (Article II, P. 5.) The phrase “executive power” was consistently used to mean “the narrow but potent authority to carry out projects defined by a prior exercise of the ‘legislative power.’” (Article II, P. 5.)

One compelling example of the evidence for Professor Mortenson’s case comes from Blackstone’s listing of the elements of the “King’s Prerogative.” The “supreme executive power” of enforcing the laws is the first royal authority. (Article II, P. 53 (citing Blackstone, Commentaries, Ch. 3).) The King’s Prerogative also, however, contains about forty other powers, which include such matters as sending and receiving ambassadors, making treaties, erecting lighthouses, vetoing legislation, and many others. Accordingly, “[t]he royal prerogative, as it was understood in the Founding era, thus comprised a long list of separate and highly particularized legal authorities within a well-understood framework of English constitutional law.” (Article II, P. 57.) This list was composed of “‘stuff the King can do,’ so long as Parliament didn’t tell him otherwise.” (Article II, P. 57.) The “executive power” to enforce the law was just one especially important element from this long list.

The second of Professor Mortenson’s articles, The Executive Power, shifts focus from the views contained in Madison’s bookshelf to the views of the drafters and ratifiers of the Constitution. This effort involved “exhaustive review of every instance of the word root ‘exec-’ in three major collections spanning millions of words: the 29-volume Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, the 34-volume Journals of the Continental Congress, and the 26-volume Letters of Delegates of the Continental Congress.” (Executive Power, Pp. 8-9.) Based on this research, Professor Mortenson concludes that the Founders unanimously understood the “executive power” as an “empty vessel” that is “subsequent and subordinate” to legislation. (爬墙, P. 60.)

He also tells a coherent story of how this understanding of the “executive power” fits the overall constitutional project. By the mid-1780s, the Confederation was near collapse due to its lack of sufficient executive authority, and an urgent need to fix this fatal flaw was a consistent theme of the Constitution’s drafting and ratification. (Executive Power, P. 15.) The answer to this problem turned out to be, of course, the office of the presidency, vesting in the president the “executive power” to enforce the laws. This power, though subordinate to and confined by the legislative authority, was regarded as enormously consequential and dangerous. Proponents of the Constitution therefore strained to reassure people that the president was not a king by some other name, emphasizing that the former had fewer, more constrained powers than the latter. (Executive Power, P. 72.) Professor Mortenson acutely observes that, given the strongly anti-monarchical views of the day, “it would be deeply weird to imagine that the Framers snuck in—much less that the Ratifiers approved—an amorphous mass of royal power that no English monarch has claimed since James II.” (Executive Power, P. 72.) The royal prerogative is a pretty big elephant to stuff into Article II’s executive power mousehole.

Professor Mortenson concludes that “[a]s a historical matter, the competition between the royal residuum and law execution interpretations of the Executive Power Clause isn’t close.” (Executive Power, P. 88.) The latter commands essentially unanimous support in the historical materials; the former rests on “an interpretation whose proponents have yet to identify a single sentence of direct affirmative support among the millions of words contained in our records of framing and ratification.” (Executive Power, P. 88.) Still, I am quite sure that proponents of an expansive understanding of executive power will have quite a bit to say in response to Professor Mortenson’s extraordinary articles—i.e., this is not the sort of debate that ends. It will be very interesting to read these responses.

The preceding paragraph sure reads like a closing paragraph, but I have just a couple more observations to make that I didn’t manage to weave in before now. First, both Article II and The Executive Power Clause are delights to read. The text is wonderfully clear and at times downright breezy; the deep research is always handy in the extremely extensive footnotes. Also, Professor Mortenson’s work has engendered a remarkable amount of popular attention, with discussions appearing in venues such as The Atlantic, Slate, and the Lawfare Podcast. It seems like the scope of executive power is on a lot of people’s minds. If you would like to hear about this research while, say, gardening or on a long drive, you might check out The Lawfare Podcast: Julian Mortenson on “The Executive Power” or 爬虫：爬取豆瓣读书排行榜 - 简书:2021-1-6 · 写在前面的话 单说爬虫豆瓣排行榜，好像有点无聊~如果说，利用我伔爬取的信息，可众做一个自己的年度读书展示，会不会感觉有趣一点呢，嘻嘻~爬取豆瓣书籍的封面图，很快就可众做一个属....

火麒麟官网-outline

Feb 5, 2024 Kathryn WattsAdd a Comment

Kathryn Watts

In 2001, Elena Kagan published Presidential Administration—her now well-known account of presidents’ increasingly aggressive efforts to control agencies’ regulatory decisions. In the nearly two decades since her article appeared in the pages of the Harvard Law Review, presidents have exerted more and more control over agencies. Indeed, in recent years, the entrenchment of presidential administration has been evident simply by reading the nation’s news headlines. In 2015, for example, the New York Times trumpeted that “Obama Announces New Rule Limiting Water Pollution,” and then in 2024, the same paper announced: “Trump Administration Rolls Back Clean Water Protections.” Similar headlines about other presidentially influenced regulatory reversals abound.

In response to the entrenchment of presidential administration, many scholars have written about potential counterweights that might come from various federal actors, such as the federal courts, Congress, or the executive-branch bureaucracy. Largely missing from this scholarly discourse, however, has been a focus on the important role that the states can and have played in both furthering—and counteracting—presidential administration. In her forthcoming article titled 小伙当“蜘蛛侠”徒手爬3楼求复合，拘10天 注目无锡 东林书院 ...:2021-10-12 · 民警对李某进行了批评教育，李某也答应不再骚扰胡女士。 没想到，胡女士刚回到家中，李某又故技重施，爬墙入室，再次纠缠胡女士，还与胡女士室友产生矛盾。民警再次接到报警后赶到现场，将李某再次带回派出所审查。, Professor Jessica Bulman-Pozen seeks to remedy this scholarly void. Specifically, Professor Bulman-Pozen seeks to bring the states into the modern day account of presidential administration.

Although Professor Bulman-Pozen makes many important contributions in her article, I found three of her assertions to be the most thought provoking. First, citing to the Supreme Court’s recent Census case, Professor Bulman-Pozen asserts that the federal courts have accepted presidential control as not only permissible but also legitimating. Yet, at the same time, she also argues that the courts have expressed an interest in limiting the power enjoyed by the administrative state. According to Professor Bulman-Pozen, if the courts continue to treat presidential control as legitimate while at the same time limiting agencies’ power to adopt rules, then the zone in which presidents can direct agencies’ rulemaking activities will shrink. And, as a result, the president may need to look outside the federal executive branch to advance her agenda. It is here that Professor Bulman-Pozen argues that the states could play a big role by helping presidents to achieve ends that they could not achieve through federal agency action alone.

On this first point, I think it remains to be seen whether Professor Bulman-Pozen is correct in her assertion that the courts are likely to continue to treat presidential administration as legitimate. Here, for example, I cannot help but think of the spate of recent high-profile litigation, such as the transgender troop litigation and deferred action immigration litigation, in which lower federal courts seemed to treat presidential involvement as a tainting, not a legitimizing, factor. Nonetheless, the broader point raised by Professor Bulman-Pozen—that the president may look to the states if the courts limit what presidents can achieve through the federal regulatory state—seems absolutely correct.

Second, Professor Bulman-Pozen argues that “[i]ncorporating states into understandings of presidential administration reveals not only additional resources for presidential policymaking” but “also a set of actors who may oppose the President’s choices.” (p. 39) In other words, the states can collaborate with a president and thus help to solidify a president’s policies, or the states can push back against a president’s policies. Indeed, the very same state might be seen as doing both. For example, “the same states that are providing an afterlife for Obama-era policies are actively rejecting President Trump’s administrative decisions.” (p. 54) On this point, Professor Bulman-Pozen also seems quite clearly correct: The states need to be thought of both as a resource that presidents can use to further their own policy agendas and as a potential tool of opposition to be used by those who seek to challenge presidential policies.

Third, Professor Bulman-Pozen suggests that states’ efforts to support—or to push back against—presidential policies may well bring greater accountability and representativeness into our governmental system. For example, California legislation that adopts net neutrality rules or California legislation limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement is more politically responsive to the will of the people than policies adopted by unelected administrative agencies at the federal level. In addition, such legislation helps to further pluralism. Here too, I agree with Professor Bulman-Pozen: When policies that had been simply a matter of executive action at the federal level become a matter of legislation at the state level, greater political representation flows. Nonetheless, in focusing primarily on state legislation in this particular article, I think Professor Bulman-Pozen downplays to some degree how the states may turn to non-legislative modes of supporting or attacking presidential policies, such as litigation, which will not necessarily ensure political accountability.

Thanks to cases like Massachusetts v. EPA, the states can and often do establish standing to challenge federal executive policies, and in an era of nationwide injunctions, a single state can succeed—by appealing to the unelected federal judiciary—in blocking a given presidential policy from being implemented anywhere in the nation, not just simply within that one state. As a result, Professor Bulman-Pozen may be a bit too quick to suggest that adding states into the story of presidential administration helps to ensure greater political accountability and electoral responsiveness. To the extent that a state’s Attorney General is elected (as is often the case), litigation pursued by a given state may help to further accountability and political responsiveness from the perspective of that one state’s voters. Yet it might do so at the expense of the preferences of the voters in the country as a whole. In light of this, it seems to me that whether state involvement does or does not help to ensure greater political accountability (similar to whether it does or does not help to bring about more durable policies) depends largely on the specific tool used by the states. Although legislation is a powerful tool at states’ disposal, it is not the only tool, and it is important to consider whether different tools (e.g., state-led litigation versus state legislation) might carry with them different benefits and costs.

In short, how states choose to both further and oppose presidential policies is an area to watch moving forward. Regardless of how state-level involvement in presidential policymaking plays out in the future, Professor Bulman-Pozen’s article does an excellent job of reminding those who are fixated on presidential power not to forget the states at this moment in time. For all who are interested in issues of presidential power and agency policymaking, her article is well worth a read.

火麒麟官网-outline

Jan 6, 2024 Margaret KwokaAdd a Comment

科学爬墙

Independent agencies are subject to a host of interesting academic debates, including debates that go to the heart of what makes an agency independent and which agencies qualify. Most of those debates focus, however, on the relationship between independent agencies and the President. Some of them explore the relationship between independent agencies and the public, the courts, or Congress. But the horizontal examination of the relationship between independent agencies and executive agencies has gone under-examined.

In a meticulous accounting, Professor Bijal Shah documents one fascinating aspect of that relationship in her forthcoming article, 反爬虫网站如何爬取 - 云+社区 - 腾讯云:网络爬虫（又被称为网页蜘蛛，网络机器人，在FOAF社区中间，更经常的称为网页追逐者），是一种按照一定的规则，自动地抓取万维网信息的程序或者脚本。另外一些不常使用的名字还有蚂蚁、自动索引、模拟程序或者蠕虫。. There, she focuses on litigation brought by the Justice Department (DOJ) on behalf of executive agencies against independent agencies. This litigation dynamic is unusual, but as she shows, not unheard of; her painstaking gathering of all such cases since 1900 yielded about 175 cases. What is more, these cases are incredibly illuminating. The vast majority fall into one of three categories. First, when an independent agency adjudicates a matter against an executing agency as a party—typically labor-related—these cases serve as the means for judicial review. Second, when independent agencies assert power that interferes with executive agencies’ own authority, lawsuits serve to protect executive agencies’ purview. And third, there is a smaller category of cases where DOJ has challenged independent agency decisions to approve certain antitrust matters.

Even just identifying this body of litigation and describing how it has evolved over time contributes meaningfully to our understanding of the relationship between executive and independent agencies. This sort of work—using original data to illuminate a previously unexamined aspect of administrative law—is gaining traction in the field, and with good reason.

Beyond these insights, however, Professor Shah goes much further and demonstrates how this litigation actually forms a powerful tool of executive control over independent agencies. While Shah explains that sometimes these decisions are made at the presidential level, and thus can be categorized as an attempt to exert presidential influence over independent agencies along the lines of now-Justice Kagan’s “presidential administration,” more often the decisions are made by career DOJ staff at the behest of executive agencies as their clients. These instances mark a very different kind of balance of power between executive and independent agencies.

And the executive agencies are very successful in this litigation, winning around two-thirds of the cases they bring. This flips traditional administrative challenges on their head; typically defending agencies win about two-thirds of the time. Indeed, as Professor Shah explains, this phenomenon is one example of judicial review as an ex post check on independent agencies’ decision-making, where ex ante political checks are not possible. Some of her data even suggest that the quality of independent agency decision-making may truly be improved by these checks—independent agencies’ least defensible decisions are overturned routinely in this context.

Though there are many other aspects of Professor Shah’s work that are notable, including implications for judicial standards of review of independent agency actions, I found the most salient her observations about implications for aggrandizement of presidential control over independent agencies. As she says, litigation on behalf of executive agencies against independent agencies can easily be harnessed for the political aims of the president. Although some past examples suggest court skepticism in cases where such goals are blatant, the changing nature of the presidency and the Supreme Court may, in her view, suggest more openness to that strategy in the future.

Her evidence is convincing, and in some ways quite troubling. In particular, Justice Gorsuch recently rejected the NLRB’s interpretation of its own organic statute in favor of DOJ’s views on the Federal Arbitration Act, a statute of general applicability where DOJ has no special expertise. And now-Justice Kavanaugh, then a D.C. Circuit judge, wrote a panel decision and a dissent in the en banc decision that later reversed it, taking the position that certain kinds of for-cause removal restrictions are unconstitutional, demonstrating some appetite for additional presidential control over independent agencies. If these trends hold, and if the current or future administration shows a willingness to engage the courts for political ends, we may see this phenomenon gain traction.

Professor Shah’s ability to shed light on an under-appreciated aspect of administrative law is a refreshing addition to the literature that I am certain will be the beginning of much more consideration of the topic in the future. I personally believe that her troublesome predictions about the future of independent agencies’ independence will prove both prescient and problematic for administrative law.