Vetoing the veto:

...Perhaps more pertinently, John Jay in Federalist No...

...Once it is appreciated that Congress delegates law-making power to independent and executive agencies," it is most difficult to understand Article I as forbidding Congress from also reserving a check on legislative power to itself.'' Justice White articulated the concern of many who, rather than see the legislative veto as congressional tyranny over the executive, regard it as a "necessary check" on the expanding power of executive and independent agencies...

...In foreign policy alone, there is the War Powers Act...

...The fact," Justice Burger argued, "that a given law or procedure is efficient, convenient, and useful in facilitating functions of government, standing alone, will not save it if it is contrary to the Constitution...

...One of the major objections to the use of the regular legislative process for resolving questions of impoundment is that a vote against impoundment may simply encounter a presidential veto - since the president proposed the impoundment of funds in the first place...

...There is even some concern as to whether the entire Budget Act would fall as well...

...Burger claimed, in an arthritically conceived and articulated decision, that the practice violated constitutional requirements preserving the separation of powers...

...Arnold Bennett observed that efficient work is the only method of avoiding hurry...

...Many times deferrals involve routine cost-saving steps or other practical matters (such as deferring spending because flooding prevents the construction of a dam...

...In expressing regret at the' 'destructive scope of the Court's holding," White finds the decision to reflect "a profoundly different conception of the Constitution than that held by the Courts which sanctioned the modern administrative state...

...the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 permits Congress to disapprove sales of public lands larger than 2,500 acres...

...This would require each House to muster a two-thirds majority to override the veto and, unless the impoundment power were denied altogether, would grant the president, in net effect, an item-veto authority which he does not have under the Constitution...

...However, there is concern in many quarters that the legislative history will show that the House'and Senate would not have originally come to an agreement on the bill if it had not allowed recourse to both forms of impoundment - thus voiding the entire title and again raising the question of the president's authority to impound funds at all...

...troops engaged without specific authorization in hostilities overseas...

...But perhaps the policy area where the use of the legislative veto has been closest to the heart of conservatives has been the restraint it has provided on the decisions of the independent regulatory agencies...

...Congressional action could also, under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Act of 1978, end agreements for the storage and disposal of spent nuclear fuels and the export of nuclear facilities or technology...

...Given the wide use and workability of the legislative veto, it would seem that the Court would exercise some semblance of prudence in interpreting the constitutional constraints on a long-standing governmental practice...

...The Chadha decision, ironically, will likely increase the possibility of hasty consideration by foreclosing the efficient allocation of congressional decision-making...

...But Burger, in justifying the awkward requirement of the president's participation in all "law-making," favorably cites Hamilton that the reason for the president's veto is "to increase the chances in favor of the community against the passing of bad laws through haste, inadvertence, or design...

...In addition, the Export Control Act of 1976 allows Congress, by concurrent resolution, to override most major presidential decisions to sell military equipment overseas...

...Justice White again dissented, pointing out that the two cases "illustrate the constitutional myopia" of Chadha and cast further light on its "destructive-ness...

...Congress has so far approved eighty-three deferral-vetoing resolutions...

...The same problem was raised by White when challenging the logic of the Chadha ruling...

...The listing in an appendix to White's dissent, of fifty-six laws that in effect did not contain the laws with provisions for vote congressional committee or those that had been enclose since the list had been compiled...

...This is also the case with many of the rescissions proposed - the other major form of impoundment...

...Congress is, of necessity, immediately occupying itself with proposals for alternative ways to control executive actions (e.g., limitations on appropriations and authorizations or modifications of an agency's jurisdiction...

...JEREMIAH BARUCH (Jeremiah Baruch is the pseudonym of a Washington writer with a position in government...

...Actually there had been at least 212 statutes with legislative veto provisions...

...But that is not to say that efficiency was an unimportant issue for the Founding Fathers...

...position in government...

...3 expected that, "Once an efficient national government is established, the best men in the country will not only consent to serve but also will generally be appointed to manage it...

...There are many other important areas affected by the Court's ruling...

...The Court reinforced its June 23 Chadha decision on the last day of the term, July 6, by setting aside a two-house veto of a Federal Trade Commission used-car rule and a one-house veto on a gas-pricing program promulgated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission...

...If either chamber adopted a resolution "vetoing" the deferral, the spending could be forced...

...Washington report VETOING THE VETO JUSTICE BURGER SAYS, 'NO' To You, O, Goddess of Efficiency, Your happy vassals bend the reverent knee Save when arthritis, your benighted foe, Sulks in the bones and sourly mumbles ''No!'' SAMUEL HOFFENSTEIN had no notion that efficiency's most recent benighted foe would be no one less than the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren Burger...

...He maintains that "it is crystal clear . . . that the Framers ranked other values higher than efficiency...

...Chief Justice Burger contends that the choices he and the majority discern as having been made in the Constitutional Convention "impose burdens on governmental processes that often seem clumsy, inefficient, even unworkable...

...But evidence indicates that many of the deferrals proposed by presidents over the past nine years were on policy grounds...

...To the contrary, it seems to have sharpened the appetite of the Court to gorge itself with its own authority...

...Watergate and Vietnam have not yet receded far enough into congressional memories to allow the president or executive officials much time for possible mischief...

...Alexander Hamilton, for example, extensively detailed the defects of the Articles of Confederation, beginning the Federalist thus: "After an unequivocal experience of the inefficiency of the subsisting federal government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America...

...but in not doing so, the Supreme Court has provided an example of power exercised without that circumscribed care that it has demanded of the Congress...

...If the president believes money should not be spent at all, he can ask Congress to rescind, or cancel, the appropriation making funds available...

...it allows Congress, by passing a concurrent resolution (a vote of both houses not requiring a presidential signature), to force the withdrawal of U.S...

...Since the rescission measure would require the president's signature, it appears that rescissions are not affected by the decision...

...Granted that better-crafted laws will help to some extent, the Court has come down with a sweeping decision without allowing Congress, or the president, time to consider the implications...

...He is appropriately concerned that, as a result of the Chadha decision, fundamental policy decisions may be made by an appointed official rather than by the body immediately accountable to the people...

...In federal spending policy, a cloud of doubt looms over the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, in which the impoundment title provides the opportunity for Congress to overturn a presidential attempt to defer, or temporarily delay, the spending of previously appropriated funds...

...It was on this "severability" Justice William Rehnquist chose to dissent...

...Under the separation-of-powers principle set forth in the Chadha case, save for such express exceptions in the Constitution as impeachment, congressional law-making authority requires the participation of both chambers and the president...

...The Court may not see that its responsibility is to address this question...

...If both the House and Senate have not approved the rescission within forty-five days, the president must release the funds...

...How is the modern administrative state to survive the democratic requirements of laws made by representatives of the people, if the execution of those laws is not subject to efficient scrutiny...

...Convenience and efficiency are not the primary objectives - or the hallmarks - of democratic government...

...Rehnquist argued that Congress would not have granted the executive branch Authority to suspend deportation (as happened, in the case at hand, with Kenya-born Jagdish Rai Chadha until the House overturned the Attorney General's decision in 1976) unless it retained veto power...

...to the fifty-year-old practice of allowing one or both houses of Congress to veto executive actions legislatively...

...As Justice Byron White observes in his dissent, "Today's decision strikes down in one fell swoop provisions in more laws enacted in Congress than the Court has cumulatively invalidated in its history...

...Burger is not going to get much dissent from Americans on that line, but he goes on in the same breath to point out that the Court's inquiry is "sharpened" by the increase in legislative veto provisions in statutes delegating authority to executive and independent agencies...

...In writing the seven-to-two majority opinion INS vs...

...Consider environmental issues: offshore oil-tract leasing could be overruled by a vote of the House or Senate...

...As a result, it appears at least a hundred laws are now in constitutional , the status of many being unclear as to whether their legislative vote provision could be struck down separately without voiding the entire law...

...Chadha, he gave a somewhat sour "No...

...The importance of the severability issue is underscored when one views the major policy areas with legislative veto provisions...

...White observed that "Congress, with the president's consent, characterically empowers the agencies with authorization to issue regulations," and that these regulations have the force of law without the president's concurrence nor are they subject to his veto...