This op-ed was originally published in The Regulatory Review. Reprinted with permission.

The idea that unelected judges rather than an elected U.S. President should resolve "major questions" that arise in the course of executing law makes no sense. And the idea that major questions should be resolved to defeat policies that the two Houses of the U.S. Congress and the President have agreed to makes even less sense. Yet, the so-called "major questions doctrine" endorsed by the U.S. Supreme Court's current majority suggests that the rule of law only governs minor cases, not matters of "vast economic and political significance."

In important cases, the Court has abandoned the role that the Administrative Procedure Act assigns it—checking the executive branch when it contravenes the policies that Congress and the President have approved. Instead, it has assumed the role of constraining the faithful execution …

This post was originally published on Verfassungsblog. It is reprinted under Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.

On the same day, the U.S. Supreme Court issued decisions governing requests for emergency stays of two rules protecting Americans from COVID-19. Both rules relied on very similar statutory language, which clearly authorized protection from threats to health. Both of them presented strikingly bad cases for emergency stays. Yet, the Court granted an emergency stay in one of these cases and denied it in the other. These decisions suggest that the Court applies judicial discretion unguided by law or traditional equitable considerations governing treatment of politically controversial regulatory cases.

Similar cases decided differently

In NFIB v. OSHA, the Court stayed a rule insisting that large employers require either vaccination or testing and masking of their employees, but it denied a stay of a rule demanding vaccination of employees …

Environmentalists have complained for years about presidential control of the administrative agencies charged with protecting the environment, seeing it as a way of thwarting proper administration of environmentally protective laws. But the U.S. Supreme Court in two recent decisions — Seila Law v. CFPB and Collins v. Yellen — made presidential control over administrative agencies a constitutional requirement (with limited and unstable exceptions) by embracing the unitary executive theory, which views administrative agencies as presidential lackeys. My new book, The Specter of Dictatorship: Judicial Enabling of Presidential Power, shows that the unitary executive theory is not only bad for environmental policy, but a threat to democracy’s survival, upon which environmental policy and all other sensible policy depends.

In The Specter of Dictatorship, I trace the modern movement toward a unitary executive back to former President Ronald Reagan’s executive order establishing centralized review of agency decisions by …

Last week, Hungarian President Viktor Orbán used the coronavirus as an excuse to secure emergency legislation giving him permanent dictatorial powers. President Trump has long admired Orbán and emulated the democracy-undermining strategies that brought Hungary to this point — demonizing opponents; seeking bogus corruption investigations against opposition politicians; using vicious rhetoric, economic pressures, and licensing threats to undermine independent media; and whipping up hatred of immigrants.

President Trump also has copied Orbán in destroying the rule of law and honest government by subjugating the executive branch of government to his will. He has made it clear to every government employee that standing up for the law or truth in opposition to Trump triggers dismissal. For example, he's conducted a campaign of retaliation against executive branch employees who dared testify truthfully to his corruption during the impeachment process, and just last week, fired the intelligence community's inspector general who …

On March 3, the Supreme Court will hear a plea to invent a new rule of constitutional law with the potential to put an end to the republic the Constitution established, if not under President Trump, then under some despotic successor. This rule would end statutory protections for independent government officials resisting a president’s efforts to use his power to demolish political opposition and protect his party’s supporters. Elected strongmen around the world have put rules in place allowing them to fire government officials for political reasons and used them to destroy constitutional democracy and substitute authoritarianism. But these authoritarians never had the audacity to ask unelected judges to write such rules, securing their enactment instead through parliamentary acts or a referendum.

The blessings of liberty in this country and other functioning democracies depend in important ways on something that legal scholars call the “internal …

This post is based on a recent article published in the University of Missouri—Kansas City Law Review.

Congressional oversight and the public's impeachment discussion tend to focus on deep dark secrets: Did President Trump conspire with the Russians? Did he cheat on his taxes? Did he commit other crimes before becoming president? The House Committee on Oversight and Reform (or the Judiciary Committee), however, should also focus on a more fundamental and less hidden problem: Trump has systematically sought to undermine the rule of law in the United States. He has done the opposite of what his oath of office requires by taking care that the law be faithlessly executed. I am not just talking about some illegal actions, but rather about a systematic effort to direct government employees to do the opposite of what the Constitution requires. For this reason, there is a need for …

Originally published in The Regulatory Review. Reprinted with permission.

President Donald J. Trump has declared a national emergency to justify building a wall on the U.S. southern border, which Congress refused to fund. But Mexicans and Central Americans coming to our country in search of a better life does not constitute an emergency. Immigration at the southern border is neither new, sudden, nor especially dangerous. The number of immigrants has been declining for years and crime rates among immigrants are lower than among native-born Americans. Drug trafficking exists at the open southern border, but it pales by comparison with drug trafficking across legal ports of entry. And President Trump did not treat this as a legal emergency until he lost his battle for funding in Congress.

Notwithstanding the bogus nature of the current crisis, legal experts fear that the Supreme Court will turn a blind eye …

In addition to deciding the fate of a Supreme Court nominee, the Senate must soon consider whether to approve Brian Benczkowski as head of criminal enforcement for the Department of Justice and a nominee to replace Scott Pruitt as EPA administrator. In early 2017, I urged senators to fulfill their constitutional responsibilities by only approving nominees who would faithfully execute the laws of the United States. But the Senate approved Pruitt anyway, with disastrous results. The chamber now needs to play its constitutional role of protecting the rule of law from Trump’s relentless assault on our safeguards and our democracy.

The Constitution requires Senate confirmation, not to rubber stamp presidential appointments, but to ensure nominees are dedicated to carrying out the law. Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist Papers that the Constitution authorizes the Senate to disapprove of presidential nominees to discourage the president from nominating …