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Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919 (1983), was a United States Supreme Court case holding that the "one-house veto" violated the constitutional separation of powers.
Facts Chadha was a foreign exchange student from Ohio with degrees in political science. His parents were of Indian nationality but he himself was born in Kenya. When his student visa expired he did not have a country to go to because neither India nor Kenya considered him a legitimate citizen or resident. The Supreme Court granted him suspension of deportation. Issue The constitutional question in the case hinged on the issue of whether Congress had the authority to exercise a legislative veto over executive agency decisions. Congress had delegated broad authority to the INS to make decisions regarding deportation proceedings, but had reserved the right to cancel some of these decisions through a resolution by either the House or the Senate. Result The Court held that Congress could not exercise a legislative veto as it was a violation of the principles of bicameralism and the Presentment Clause; in the eyes of the justices, Congress was essentially passing new legislation (that overturned the INS decision) via resolution, without allowing the President to play his constitutionally assigned role in the legislative process. While innovative ways of sharing powers between the branches are useful, such methods must conform to the constitutional provisions which mandate the separation of powers. Aftermath Since the Chadha ruling a new line of originalist/textualist scholarship has suggested that the Supreme Court misconstrued the relevant constitutional text, particularly U.S. Const. Article I, Section 7, Clause 3. The position taken in the new scholarship is that the Constitution expressly permits statutory delegation to a single house of Congress, if and only if both the statute and the single house resolution (which might function as a legislative veto) are separately presented to the President. If this view is correct, then the statute litigated in Chadha was constitutional (as a matter of original meaning), but the House’s resolution remained unenforceable until presented to the President. | ||||||||
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