Reassessing the Legislative Veto: The Statutory President, Foreign Affairs, and Congressional Workarounds

Abstract

A chief reason that the President is insufficiently constrained when exercising statutorily-delegated power, it is claimed, is the Supreme Court’s disallowance of legislative vetoes in its decision in INS v. Chadha, a claim that intensified during the Trump administration. This article challenges this account, arguing that the availability of the legislative veto was less important before Chadha to congressional-executive relations than legal scholars commonly assume, and that, to the extent that the legislative veto was (or would have become) important for checking some exercises of statutorily-delegated authority, Congress has developed a host of effective workarounds in the years since Chadha.