State courts have heard challenges to legislative veto of administrative rules in at least 11 states, with all but two ruling that the power—or the process being used—was unconstitutional. Court decisions in Idaho and Missouri illustrate the differing perspectives.
In Mead v. Arnell, P. The court determined that only the legislature can make laws and that administrative rules have a lesser status than statutory law, thereby allowing a statute that authorized a veto through legislative resolution to stand. In Missouri Coalition for the Environment v.
Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, S. The court determined that the legislature "may not unilaterally control execution of rulemaking authority after its delegation of rulemaking power," requiring it to pass a bill for the governor's signature if it chose to alter a rule. If you have any questions, please contact Brenda Erickson. Also, please contact Brenda if you would like to recommend legislative resources or case law that may enhance the Separation of Powers website.
Create Account. Separation of Powers: Legislative Oversight During the past three decades, legislatures have enhanced their capacity to play a more active role in the policymaking process. The Constitution states that Parliament has the power to conduct oversight of all organs of state, including those at provincial and local government level.
Oversight is a function granted by the Constitution to Parliament to monitor and oversee government actions. By overseeing the actions of government, Parliament is able to ensure that service delivery takes place, so that all citizens can live a better quality life.
The Constitution states that the National Assembly is elected to represent the people and to ensure government by the people under the Constitution.
It does this by:. The National Council of Provinces represents the provinces to ensure that provincial interests are taken into account in the national sphere of government. Parliamentary committees are established as instruments of the Houses in terms of the Constitution to facilitate oversight and monitor the government. In addition, House rules require that the findings and recommendations from the Government Reform Committee be considered by authorizing panels, if presented to them in a timely fashion.
Oversight occurs through a wide variety of congressional activities and avenues. Some of the most publicized are the comparatively rare investigations by select committees into major scandals or into executive branch operations gone awry. The precedent for this kind of oversight goes back two centuries: in , a special House committee investigated the defeat of an Army force by confederated Indian tribes. The room is located on the second floor, on the west side of the building, adjacent to the Senate chamber.
The view is looking toward the front of the building. Advice and consent is a power of the Senate to be consulted on and approve treaties signed by the president. In the United States, advice and consent is a power of the United States Senate to be consulted on and approve treaties signed and appointments made by the President of the United States to public positions, including Cabinet secretaries, federal judges, and ambassadors.
The founding fathers of the United States included the language as part of a delicate compromise concerning the balance of power in the federal government. Many delegates preferred to develop a strong executive control vested in the president, while others, worried about authoritarian control, preferred to strengthen the Congress. Requiring the president to gain the advice and consent of the Senate achieved both goals without hindering the business of government. Under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, appointments to the Office of Vice President are confirmed by a majority vote in both Houses of Congress, instead of just the Senate.
Several framers of the U. Constitution believed that the required role of the Senate is to advise the president after the nomination. Roger Sherman believed that advice before nomination could still be helpful. Likewise, President George Washington took the position that pre-nomination advice was allowable but not mandatory.
Typically, a congressional hearing is held to question the appointee. For a treaty, a two-thirds vote of the Senate is required anyway; thus, a filibuster could only delay passage. Impeachment is an expressed power that allows for formal charges against a civil officer of government for crimes committed in office. Impeachment in the United States is an expressed power of the legislature that allows for formal charges against a civil government officer for crimes committed in office.
The actual trial on those charges, and subsequent removal of an official on conviction on those charges, is separate from the act of impeachment itself. Impeachment is analogous to indictmentin regular court proceedings. Trial by the other house is analogous to the trial before judge and jury in regular courts.
Typically, the lower house of the legislature will impeach the official and the upper house will conduct the trial. At the federal level, Article II of the United States Constitution Section 4 , states that the President, Vice President, and all civil officers of the United States shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and in conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.
The House of Representatives has the sole power of impeaching, while the United States Senate has the sole power to try all impeachments. The removal of impeached officials is automatic upon conviction in the Senate. Regularly, the news media spotlighted such stories as the hikes in joblessness, home foreclosures, or plant closings.
As a result, the government intervened dramatically in the marketplace. Trillions of dollars were committed to revive the ailing economy and prevent the recession from spiraling downward into another depression. Johnson," wrote a congressional journalist, has a president like Obama "moved to expand the role of government so much on so many fronts—and with such a sense of urgency. In short, the probabilities of any major retrenchment or rollback in the role and scope of the federal government seem remote.
Hence the importance of Congress exercising its implicit constitutional prerogative to check the delegated authority that it grants to federal departments and agencies.
The goals of this report, then, are essentially six-fold: 1 highlight several reasons for the expansion of the role and reach of government; 2 discuss a few definitions of oversight; 3 spotlight three essential purposes of oversight; 4 comment upon a few oversight laws and rules; 5 review several important oversight techniques; and 6 identify several incentives and disincentives to the conduct of congressional oversight.
From the beginning, our Founding Fathers argued about the role of the national government. Their basic argument continues to this day. Two schools of thought emerged during this early period, one articulated by Thomas Jefferson and the other by Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson was an advocate of limited government: "That government governs best that governs least. As Jefferson said in his March 4, , inaugural address:.
Still one thing more, fellow-citizens—a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities. President Jefferson, however, was not reluctant to use the government to double the size of the country with the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson's rival, Alexander Hamilton, favored a strong national government and an energetic chief executive as essential if the new nation was to survive and prosper.
A proponent of the implied powers of government, Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. As Abraham Lincoln put it, "Government is people coming together collectively to do that which they could not do as well, or at all, individually. Fast forward to the contemporary era and it appears evident that the Hamiltonian view has largely prevailed over the Jeffersonian perspective. To be sure, Jefferson's ideas of limited government and states' rights resonate powerfully with millions of Americans including lawmakers, analysts, scholars, and others.
Yet their actions often belie their words. Today's yeoman farmers might say they dislike or even resent big government, but they strongly support farm subsidies. Many people, it seems, are ideologically conservative but operationally liberal. On the one hand, they may emotionally view government as a necessary evil, but personally they support federal programs that benefit them, and even welcome the government's expansion in various areas security from terrorist attacks, protection of the environment, and so on.
The fundamental reality is that the national government has taken on increasingly numerous functions and responsibilities throughout American history. The 20 th century—from the Progressive era to World War I, from the New Deal to the Great Society—witnessed a huge increase in the size and power of government. Its expansion was driven by a number of factors. Domestic and international crises have expanded the reach of the government. Wars, for example, threaten the nation itself, and the government often accrues new and expanded prerogatives to protect the country.
The internationalization of numerous domestic issues—trade, the environment, immigration, drug trafficking, and more—often requires a federal response for their resolution. Complexity is another factor the promotes governmental growth. New issues and problems constantly arise that call for governmental action, such as food safety or national preparedness in the event of an epidemic or pandemic H1N1, the swine flu virus, for instance.
Many national programs, moreover, are crosscutting—that is, more than one federal agency, jurisdiction, and, in some cases, international organizations are engaged in policy implementation—which adds to the complexness of determining how or what the government is doing. To be sure, a nation with over million people creates a variety of federal issues civil rights, financial turmoil, high unemployment, and so on. Even when issues have been traditionally under the purview of states and localities, such as education, it does not mean that they are exclusively state and local responsibilities.
In brief, a host of military, economic, and social challenges, along with many other factors industrialization, globalization, scientific and technological developments, public demand, and more , all contributed to the large expansion in the size and reach of the federal government.
Given today's large federal establishment, congressional oversight is more important than ever in ensuring that the federal government functions economically, efficiently, and effectively. The American public's traditional and usually healthy skepticism about concentrating power in government underscores the legislative review function's significant role in holding federal agencies and officials accountable for their actions and decisions.
To determine the quantity and quality of legislative oversight is not an easy assignment, however. Different definitions of oversight influence perspectives on the adequacy of the review function. Oversight has two basic dictionary meanings. First, it denotes some form of legislative "supervision" or "watchfulness" of delegated authority to executive branch entities and officials. It is this general definition that orients the focus of this report.
The second meaning of oversight implies a "failure to notice"—something that is overlooked or inadvertently omitted. Ironically, the two definitions may sometimes overlap one another. As Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill, D-Mass. Congress has "delegated so much authority to the executive branch of government, and we ought to devote more time to oversight then we do. Scholars have advanced a number of definitions of oversight that go beyond the meanings provided in dictionaries. For example, one political scientist wrote: '"Oversight,' strictly speaking refers to review after the fact.
It includes inquiries about policies that are or have been in effect, investigations of past administrative actions, and the calling of executive officers to account for their financial transactions.
The absence of consensus on a precise definition means that it is difficult quantitatively to know how much oversight Congress is performing, largely through its committees and subcommittees. Oversight is a ubiquitous activity on Capitol Hill that occurs in various ways, forums, and activities. It is subsumed in many hearings, meetings, or informal settings that may not be labeled as "oversight. Thus, questions about whether Congress does enough oversight are difficult to answer because of methodological limitations time and resources, for instance in measuring its frequency comprehensively and systematically.
Moreover, how "oversight is defined affects what oversight one finds. Worth raising is a related matter: What constitutes effective or quality oversight? The traditional method of exercising congressional oversight is through committee hearings and investigations into executive branch operations. For more than years, Congress has conducted investigations of varying types and with varying results.
Along the way, there have been abuses and excesses—for example, the Army-McCarthy hearings about communists in government—and successes and accomplishments. For instance, the World War II Truman Committee's after Senator and later President Harry S Truman investigation of the war mobilization effort, including waste and fraud in defense procurement, was viewed by many as a large success.
Although people may disagree on what constitutes "quality" oversight, there are a number of components that appear to foster effective oversight. They include 1 a committee chair who is committed to doing oversight on a sustained basis; 2 the involvement of committee members in an activity that might take weeks or months of time and resources; 3 bipartisanship: more is likely to be achieved when both parties work together rather than against each other; 4 an experienced professional staff with investigatory skills; 5 preparation and documentation in advance of public hearings; 6 coordination with other relevant committees of jurisdiction; and 7 follow-through to ensure that any recommendations of the committee are acted upon.
Helpful, too, is a cooperative Administration. Absent cooperation, committees may need to use compulsory processes subpoena and contempt to obtain pertinent reports and documents and the testimony of key witnesses. Oversight is an implicit constitutional obligation of the Congress. According to Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. In short, oversight plays a key role in our system of checks and balances. There is a large number of overlapping purposes associated with oversight.
This array can be divided into three basic types: programmatic, political, and institutional. P rogrammati c purposes include such objectives as making sure agencies and programs are working in a cost-effective and efficient manner; ensuring executive compliance with legislative intent; evaluating program performance; improving the economy of governmental performance; investigating waste, fraud, and abuse in governmental programs; reviewing the agency rulemaking process; acquiring information useful in future policymaking; or determining whether agencies or programs are fulfilling their statutory mission.
There are also political purposes associated with oversight, such as generating favorable publicity for lawmakers, winning the electoral support of constituents and outside groups, or rebutting criticisms of favorite programs or agencies. After all, oversight occurs in an ever-present political context in which Congress's relationship with administrative entities can range from cooperation to conflict.
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