This submission focuses on something that is very important in the history of nondelegation caselaw: the Courts work very hard to ensure that the scope of delegations aren't as broad as the text would otherwise indicate.
While it's often said that the doctrine has been "dormant" (as the submission puts it), it's not entirely clear that's true. The Court in various cases has inferred limits on the scope of the delegation by looking to statutory history, legislative history, administrative practice, comparable statutes, and so forth.
Consider American Power & Light Co. v. SEC, 329 U. S. 90 (1946). At 104, the Court concluded that certain seemingly vague delegations "derive[d] much meaningful content from the purpose of the Act, its factual background and the statutory context in which they appear."
Consider Lichter v. United States, 334 U. S. 742 (1948). At 783, the Court upheld delegation of authority to recapture "excessive profits" in light of a preexisting administrative practice.
Consider National Cable Television Assn. v. United States, 415 U.S. 336 (1974). At 341-343 the Court pretty straightforwardly said that if the agency's interpretation were correct, it would raise a nondelegation issue. So they applied constitutional avoidance and adopted a narrower interpretation of the statute.
Consider the Benzene Case: Indus. Union Dept. v. Amer. Petroleum Inst., 448 U.S. 607 (1980).
[A] Four Justices at 646 said that if the government's interpretation were correct, it would raise a nondelegation problem.
[B] Of those four, three Justices rejected the agency's interpretation by looking to [i] legislative history, [ii] past agency interpretations, and [iii] statutory practice with regard to comparable grants of authority.
[C] Of those four, one Justice rejected the agency's interpretation by inferring that Congress as a default matter required cost-benefit analysis unless stated otherwise. The text didn't really require this, but he thought it would be weird it that weren't the case.
[D] A fifth Justice in a concurrence in the judgement said the statute violated the nondelegation doctrine. He felt the other four - and the dissenters - were going too far in reading limits on the agency into the statute which weren't in the plain text of it. ("One of the primary sources looked to by this Court in adding gloss to an otherwise broad grant of legislative authority is the legislative history of the statute in question. The opinions of [the plurality] and [the dissent], however, give little more than a tip of the hat to the legislative origins of [the statutory provision"].
[E] The dissenters also seemed to think there was a bit of a delegation issue, but they looked to the legislative history to resolve the case in a different manner and to divine a different constraint
Thus, the Nondelegation Doctrine is not so much "dormant" is it is operating in the background.
As far as I'm aware, there has been no systemic breakdown of cases in which the Court has said "the government's proffered interpretation would be a nondelegation issue, therefore we reject that interpretation." But as a doctrinal matter, the explicit rejection of a particular interpretation as running afoul, or likely running afoul, of the nondelegation doctrine is just about as valuable as actually finding a nondelegation violation. It gives you another data point to work with beyond the limited examples of Schechter Poultry and Panama Refining Co.
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The Court has also applied a kind of rights-based nondelegation doctrine.
This has been explored in cases like Kent v. Dulles, 357 U.S. 116 (1958). At 129 they raised the prospect that nondelegation applies more strictly over issues of individual rights. In that case, it was a mix of First Amendment liberties and the right to international travel. There they expressly identified the nondelegation case of Panama Refining Co at 129.
In Aptheker v. Secretary of State, 378 U.S. 500 (1964), the Court said the same with respect to First Amendment liberties and the Freedom of Travel. They also flagged the Fourth Amendment's protections as applicable.
In Greene v. McElroy, 360 U.S. 474 (1959), the Court said this logic applied to deprivation of already existing employment agreements too.
This model was most thoroughly spelt out in Justice Brennan's Concurrence in the Judgment in United States v. Robel, 389 U. S. 258, 276 (BRENNAN, J., concurring in judgment).
And as the Cato Submission Notes, the Court's Vagueness Doctrine jurisprudence serves much the same function as the nondelegation doctrine otherwise would have.
The rule of lenity arguably also serve much the same function.
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Finally, the argument that the nondelegation doctrine has been "dormant" since the New Deal raises the question of what the doctrine was *before* the New Deal.
As far as I can tell, the Court always just upheld things in the face of nondelegation challenges prior to the two famous cases in 1935.
Granted, the *scope* of the delegations may have meaningfully changed from the New Deal onwards. But it seems noteworthy that the Lower Court in Schechter Poultry didn't identify a nondelegation issue with the statute.
In JW Hampton (1928), what the Court ultimately upheld was authorization on the part of the Tariff Commission to engage in a factfinding matter. The President was ordered to calculate a tariff rate based on costs of production so as to equalize the price of foreign imported goods with their American counterparts.
There was discretion in how to calculate the tariff (should the president use median cost, average cost, cost based on big producers, cost based on all producers, cost based on one year, cost based on multiple years, etc.), but it was ultimately a factual inquiry. And this discretion in how to determine a valuation was in line with Congress's very first major tax delegation statute (the direct tax of 1790, in which county boards were told to given discretion on how to assess property values).
It's also worth noting that the famous "intelligible principle" line was the Court saying that the same governing rule for delegations involving rate-fixing of utilities and common carriers in interstate commerce applies to rate-fixing of import tariffs at page 409 ("If Congress shall lay down by legislative act an intelligible principle to which the person or body authorized to fix such rates is directed to conform, such legislative action is not a forbidden delegation of legislative power.") It's not really clear from the opinion itself whether they were actually divining a general rule for nondelegation as a whole.
This is especially likely given that at 408 the Court quotes the railroad ratemaking case ICC v. Goodrich Transit Co., 224 U.S. 194, 214 (1912): "The Congress may not delegate its purely legislative power to a commission, but, having laid down the general rules of action under which a commission shall proceed, it may require of that commission the application of such rules to particular situations and the investigation of facts, with a view to making orders in a particular matter within the rules laid down by the Congress."
The Court in JW Hampton said that "delegations of legislative authority must be judged "according to common sense and the inherent necessities of the governmental coordination." So a question of whether the delegation was *necessary* on the part of Congress seemed to be a pretty important factor.
Hence why Justice Rehnquist in the Benzene Case at 675-676 inferred that JW Hampton required an inquiry into "whether such a standardless delegation was justifiable in light of the 'inherent necessities' of the situation."
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Finally, it is worth noting how few cases involving delegations prior to the 1970s involved legislative-style rulemaking involving private rights.
Most delegations prior to the 1970s involved the fixing of prices (a kind of quasi-adjudication, though often lumped into the legislative category because of prospective effects), agency adjudications of labor disputes, arbitrations of claims, assignment of licenses and permits (considered a kind of adjudication), and so forth.
The cases which involved legislative-style rulemaking tended to either involve the government handling its own affairs (such as United States v. Grimaud, involving the management of public lands) or delegations involving the delegatee having some inherent and residual authority over the matter (Indian tribes and states having some power of criminal affairs; the President having inherent powers relating to diplomacy and foreign affairs; etc.).
In this respect, Schechter Poultry and Panama Refining Co were indeed quite unique insofar as they granted straightforward rulemaking authority over domestic interstate commerce to the President. Even moreso because they gave authority to the President himself, rather than to a commission (something Justice Jackson as Solicitor General flagged in Currin v. Wallace, 306 U.S. 1 (1939)).
The Supreme Court has long recognized a “nondelegation doctrine,” which holds that Congress must provide executive agencies with an “intelligible principle” to govern the exercise of delegated authority. During the Second World War, however, the doctrine entered a period of dormancy, as wartime decisions deferential to the political branches truncated its development. Congress has since avoided difficult policy choices by granting broad authority to agencies—undermining the separation of powers and diminishing individual liberty. The Court now has a chance to revive and clarify the doctrine in a case called RMS v. EPA.
RMS, which does business as
@choice_refrig, produces refrigerant blends for a multibillion-dollar domestic market. In 2020, Congress enacted the AIM Act, mandating an 85 percent reduction in certain refrigerants through a cap-and-trade program administered by the EPA. To implement the phasedown, the Act requires EPA to allocate production-and-consumption “allowances”—without which no person may lawfully produce or consume these refrigerants. Yet Congress provided no guidance on how EPA should distribute roughly 98 percent of those allowances.
Choice challenged this arrangement as an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power. The D.C. Circuit rejected that challenge, and Choice has petitioned the Supreme Court for review.
@CatoInstitute has now filed an amicus brief supporting Choice and urging the Court to grant the petition, co-authored with
@bskorup and
@AMXenos.
Our brief argues that this is a straightforward nondelegation case. Article I vests legislative power in Congress, and Congress cannot evade that responsibility by giving EPA unbounded discretion to choose which firms may continue participating in a major industry. The Constitution requires Congress to make the hard policy choices itself. Under the AIM Act, however, EPA can pick winners and losers without any intelligible principle from Congress to constrain its choices.
Our brief also explains why the D.C. Circuit erred. Rather than acknowledge that Congress failed to supply a limiting principle, the court attempted to save the statute by importing one from legislative history and a Clean Air Act provision that the AIM Act never references or incorporates. But the Constitution requires Congress—not an Article III court concocting a legislative judgment Congress never made—to cabin agency discretion. Allowing courts to perform that function does not solve the separation-of-powers problem; it compounds it.
Finally, our brief identifies an important rule-of-law problem created by the decision below. When Congress leaves the law this open-ended, the operative rules are neither fixed nor predictable. A company like Choice Refrigerants can invest millions of dollars developing products, building market share, and planning for the future—only to find that a change in administration, or even a change in EPA leadership, has wiped out its market position because the agency chose to fill the statutory void differently.
We urge the Court to grant the petition and make clear that Congress may not abdicate its legislative power.