| Venue: | SCOTUS |
| Facts: | Chadha overstays his visa, but INS finds that he meets the requirements of some act or other, and should be allowed to stay. Congress has the authority to veto these stays of deportation. |
| Posture: | Chadha sues to terminate deportation proceedings on the theory that the law allowing congressional veto is unconstitutional. |
| Issue: | Are legislative vetoes a bad thing? |
| Holding: | Yes. That law is unconstitutional. |
| Rule: | Congress can't engage in individual executions of the law; it must abide by its delegation of authority or go through the legislative process to make changes. |
| Reasoning: | Congress makes policy determinations by bicameral passage of legislation. Legislative veto might be a useful power, but it violates Article I's specifications of how congress is supposed to function. The presidential veto is established in the constitution, and the legislative veto is a later invention (1932). The framers insisted on bicameral legislation to avoid despotism, and this veto takes only one house. |
| Dicta: | Powell (concurring): maybe not ALL legislative vetoes are bad; we are
only deciding about this one.
White (dissenting): if legislative vetoes are not allowed, then the legislature is obligated either not to delegate (which will leave them with too much work) or to delegate (which means administrative law-making rules). If we can delegate some power to executive agencies, it doesn't make sense to think that Article I prohibits reserving a bit of the power to congress. |