Nondelegation in the States: Separated Powers & Sovereignty

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Silver
Keyword(s):  
1990 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 316-352
Author(s):  
Matthew A. Pauley

Students of the exercise of emergency powers in the American governmental system have taken note in recent years of an obviously widening gap between what presidents assert they can do in emergencies and what congressional and court critics of presidents, and many serious scholars, say are the constitutional and statutory limits on executive emergency powers. The perceived widening gap is something new, though Americans seem to have accustomed themselves to it quickly enough. In the shadow of what has come to be called the era of the imperial Presidency, some say that one extreme tendency demands a compensating counterbalancing tendency toward the opposite extreme. Indeed, it is now widely believed that what had been an acceleratingquantitativeincrease in presidential power has largely resulted in aqualitativetransformation that threatens the continuance of “free government,” requiring intensified criticism of presidential practice as well as, perhaps, a temporary exercise of emergency powers by other branches of our government to restore the traditional balance of separated powers.


2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
John H. Aldrich

This address asks how we got to today’s politics in America; a politics of polarized political parties engaged in close political competition in a system of checks and balances. The result has often been divided control of government and an apparent inability to address major political problems. This address develops the historical foundation for these characteristics. Historically, the Founding period set the stage of separated powers and the first party system. America developed a market economy, a middle class, and a mass-based set of parties in the Antebellum period. Through the Progressive era, nation-wide reforms led to a more democratic but increasingly candidate-centered politics in the North, and the establishment of Jim Crow politics in the South. The post-War period saw the full development of candidate-centered elections. While the breakup of Jim Crow due to the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the mid-1960s ended Jim Crow and made possible a competitive party system in the South, the later was delayed until the full implementation of the Republican’s “southern strategy” in 1980 and beyond. This set in motion the partisan polarization of today, to combine with separated powers to create what many refer to as the “current” political “dysfunction.”


Public Voices ◽  
10.22140/pv.7 ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Catherine Horiuchi

Can reading great literature, considering its heroes and small characters, improve the performance of public sector actors? King Lear’s characters fault a wickedly disinterested heaven for life’s setbacks and woes. Yet Shakespeare makes clear that these actors’ own terrible choices beset the king, his family and the rest of us who are subject to the acts of public leaders. Reading this literature as analogy for the effectiveness of the modern public sector suggests how administrative operation of our democratic state may – or may not – successfully parcel power and control so as to limit negative externalities derived from ill-informed, self-serving or rent-seeking executive and individual decisions. Lear’s tragic arc mimics a sorrowful “muddling through” and potentially unnecessary “satisficing” in certain large public works projects. One large public project currently deemed successful is examined here – the replacement of the eastern span of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco – as a reflection on separated powers, the limits of human nature, and the inevitability of error.


Author(s):  
Joanna Grisinger

This chapter discusses the emergence of regulatory governance from the Progressive movement. The Progressives laid the groundwork for an entirely new “branch” of the federal government by thinking comprehensively about how regulatory authority should be structured. These reformers created an enduring model for federal management of the marketplace: independent commissions and relatively independent executive agencies given quasi-legislative, quasi-executive, and quasi-judicial authority (that is, all the powers that the Constitution intentionally kept separate). Thus, the Progressive legacy can be traced not just to the growth of the administrative state but also to this ongoing determination to prove that agency governance can be reconciled with constitutionally separated powers. Without any firm resolution of this tension, twentieth-century governance was marked by these two systems of governance often working at cross-purposes, each compromising the integrity of the other.


Congress ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 261-289
Author(s):  
Benjamin Ginsberg ◽  
Kathryn Wagner Hill

This chapter turns to the relationship between the legislative and judiciary branches. It shows that in contemporary America, the judiciary has formed a de facto “union” with the executive and has in some respects helped to diminish the role of Congress in the American governmental system. This was not always the case, however, as the constitutional system of checks and balances assigns Congress a good deal of power over the judiciary. When they created the Constitution's system of separated powers and checks and balances, the framers had regarded the Congress as the branch most likely to seek to expand its power and the judiciary as the “least dangerous branch.” Since then, however, Americans have come to accept the idea that the federal courts can declare acts of Congress to be inconsistent with the Constitution and, therefore, null and void.


1962 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 621-633 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Roland Pennock

Political scientists today are more cautious than they used to be about comparing forms of government and evaluating their virtues. Moreover, in such comparisons as we do make, we rightly lay more stress on party systems and even more informal aspects of government than on constitutional forms. Yet much of what is said by way of comparing and evaluating the disciplined and programmatic type of political party with the American type carries an undertone of the old arguments. Virtues once attributed to the British style of Parliamentary government, honorifically tagged “responsible government,” are now associated with “party government,” while the evils earlier (and still) attributed to the separation of powers are now frequently laid at the door of a weak party system. To be sure, many who criticize the American constitutional and political arrangements for irresponsibility make no claim that the British system is superior.


1967 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 568-583 ◽  
Author(s):  
I. William Zartman

Le système politique rnarocain est original en Afrique, non seulernent parce que le Maroc est doté d'un régime monarchique rnais aussi parce que ce pays est Ie seul à avoir tenté et poursuivi depuis son accession à l’indépendance une experience de multipartisme.Societies are generally neither monolithic nor homogeneous; every political system must deal with the problem of pluralism in some way. But political systems tend to be organized hierarchically, with power and authority concentrated at the top. The confrontation of social pluralism and political concentration can well give rise to tensions, since centralized political structures deal with diversified social interests. Tensions are also likely to grow out of pluralism within the political structure itself, as factions form on the bases of personalities, programmes and interests. Factions can exist within a single organizational or institutional framework, or they can be reflected in competing parties, checking and balancing institutions, and separated powers. The single-party regime has often become a familiar way of containing these tensions and factions in developing countries, particularly in Africa, and the existence of many African single-party regimes has led to efforts to discover the common elements behind the common phenomenon. The purpose of this study is not to challenge these explanations, but to look more broadly into the nature of interests, factions and power in developing polities, suggesting a model of political development that puts both unipartism and political pluralism in their places.


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