Lastly, at the highest level, the Supreme Court and its nine appointed justices serve as the highest court in the land. As the arbiters determining the legality of pieces of legislation, the Supreme Court justices look to the Constitution, which is the highest law in the land, when hearing existing cases or when interpreting laws passed by the legislative branch.
Both Supreme Court justices and judges of the courts of appeals and district courts serve for life and do not leave their posts unless they retire, die, or are impeached. This ensures that their decisions are not motivated by politics because they need to win an election. The legislative branch is made up of the House of Representatives and the Senate.
Together, these two bodies form Congress. Congress is the only branch of the federal government that can enact laws, raise and appropriate funds, declare war, and impeach officials such as the president.
Both chambers of Congress are directly elected by the people. While the population of each state determines its number of representatives, each state only gets two senators. Furthermore, while senators vote according to the wishes of all of the people in their state, representatives vote according to will of the people in their districts. Representatives serve two-year terms, while senators serve six-year terms.
In order for bills to be enacted, they must first be introduced to the House or Senate, where they start by being considered by committees. Anyone can draft pieces of legislation, but they must be brought before Congress by either a senator or a representative. Nor is the argument borne out by a history of institutional practice.
The First Congress's handiwork regarding the structure of the initial administrative departments is inconsistent with the idea that the Framers intended a unitary executive. Congress accommodated presidential control at different levels, from seemingly complete, as with the Department of State, to essentially non-existent, as with the boards and commissions authorized to oversee the Mint, to buy back debt of the United States, and to rule on patent applications.
Unitary executive advocates may point to a variety of presidential statements over the years asserting the existence of a comprehensive presidential supervisory authority. But again to quote Justice Jackson, who wrote in about constitutional debates on the scope of presidential power: "A century and a half of partisan debate and scholarly speculation yields no net result but only supplies more or less apt quotations from respected sources on each side of any question.
Unitarian arguments based on presidential statements simply cannot overcome Congress's conspicuous eclecticism from its first session forward in fashioning different administrative structures with different lines of accountability to different sources of supervision.
Finally, the argument for the unitary presidency makes the mistake of anachronism. The managerial presidency extolled in the late eighteenth century was just not conceptualized in the policy terms now understood by modern presidentialists. Even if the original presidential office had been intended to be unitary in some administrative sense, the President's originally designed managerial powers cannot logically add up to the contemporary version of unitary power urged upon us by twenty-first century presidentialists, who interpret the Constitution as putting the President personally in charge of the exercise of any or all policy making discretion that Congress may delegate to anyone within the executive branch.
A better view is fully reconcilable with the text and truer to both relevant Supreme Court opinions and our institutional history. It holds that outside those particular subjects that are independently within the President's inherent powers, such as issuing pardons or making treaties, the degree of policy control the President may exercise over subordinate officers is up to Congress.
Congress is limited, in turn, only by the Constitution's constraints on the scope of national legislative authority and the President's entitlement to dismiss officers of the United States who are breaking the law or negligent in the execution of their duties. For this reason, there is an intimate connection between the President's relationship with Congress and the President's relationship to the remainder of the executive establishment.
Specifically, the latter is significantly determined by the former. The Constitution gives Congress the political discretion to defer substantially to the pleas of the executive for highly centralized control over administrative agencies, but only if Congress chooses to do so. The bare framework of Article II leaves presidents with the task of persuading Congress that authorizing such control over any particular agency is in the public interest -- a judgment of policy, not constitutional interpretation.
The practice and jurisprudence of the Treaty and Appointments Clauses err when they depart, as they too often do, from the original meaning of the Constitution. The original meaning is the meaning that would have been most likely embraced by a reasonable person at the time of the Framing. Because the Constitution is written in the language of the law, the original meaning is constituted by the text in its historical and legal context.
Courts are obligated to use the interpretive methods at the time of enactment to find the better-supported meaning, even if an ambiguous text can yield more than one meaning. The results of an originalist reading of these Clauses would at times favor the President, but at other times disfavor him, but they would more generally promote accountability. They would also create more bright line rules and limit the discretion of the Supreme Court to make decisions according to opaque balancing tests that maximize its own power.
Appointments Clause. The Appointments Clause must be read against the background of "the executive power" granted to the President. That authority included the traditional powers of an executive, not simply enumerated powers as those specified in Article I. Article II then qualifies that understanding by expressly giving some of the executive's traditional powers to Congress. In the Appointments Clause, the Senate is given the power to advise and consent to nominations. Because the Constitution does not change the executive's power to dismiss subordinate officers, the President retains that unqualified power, as it was part of the traditional executive authority.
This view reflects the majority view of the First Congress after a deliberate debate when they did insulate the President's authority over the Secretary of State.
The contrary decisions of the Court are both wrong and unclear. In Morrison v. Olson , for instance, the Court did not offer a rule for determining when Congress could insulate the President's power, but made instead the question depend on such factors as the scope and authority of the office at issue. This aggrandized the Court's power and unsettled an established framework for government.
Similarly, the Court is wrong to permit courts to appoint executive officials so long as there is no "'incongruity' between the functions normally performed by the courts and the performance of their duty to appoint. It is true that the Appointments Clause allows "courts of law" to appoint "inferior officers. There the judicial power is defined as "extending to cases. Accordingly, courts of law can appoint the officers ancillary to their own work of deciding cases, like law clerks and bailiffs, but not executive officials.
Once again, the Supreme Court has replaced a relatively clear line with a murky test that exalts the judiciary's own powers. Similarly, Morrison 's balancing test for what is an inferior officer wrongly focused on the breadth of the officer's mandate, length of tenure, and limited independent policy making. The appropriate test for inferior officer flows directly from the term's obvious meaning: such an officer must be subordinate to a principal officer; one who has been confirmed by the Senate.
Politically motivated leaks were common and resulted in all treaty debates being held publicly since unless classified due to sensitive information. During treaty debates, RUDs can be proposed and, if passed, become attached to the resolution. For the treaty to succeed, two-thirds of senators must vote in support, giving treaties a high bar for passage.
The Senate does not ratify treaties themselves, in any case. If passed, the resolution goes back to the executive branch, and it is then ratified between the United States and the foreign entity. Once a treaty is ratified, the supremacy clause in the Constitution means that it becomes part of domestic law. Treaties also take precedence over state law, meaning that each state must abide by the treaty rules even if they object. In addition to domestic force, ratified treaties also become part of international law and take effect globally.
Over time, workarounds to the official treaty process have been created. A prominent example is the emergence of congressional-executive agreements. This type of agreement is different from a treaty for many reasons. First, they are not ratified and are subjected to the limits of the normal law-making process, i. Congressional-executive agreements only require a simple majority of the U. House of Representatives and Senate to pass and are a popular way to enact policies that may be too controversial for a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate.
The other party leader is called the minority leader. The President is the head of the executive branch, which makes laws official. The President is elected by the entire country and serves a four-year term. The President approves and carries out laws passed by the legislative branch. He appoints or removes cabinet members and officials. He negotiates treaties, and acts as head of state and commander in chief of the armed forces. The executive branch also includes the Vice President and other officials, such as members of the cabinet.
The cabinet is made up of the heads of the 15 major departments of the government. The cabinet gives advice to the President about important matters. The judicial branch oversees the court system of the U.
Through court cases, the judicial branch explains the meaning of the Constitution and laws passed by Congress. The Supreme Court is the head of the judicial branch.
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