Yahoo has close ties to mainstream media so it is far from a right wing organization. I stumbled across this story and the outcome was surprising to say the least.
“The principle that Congress cannot delegate away its vested powers exists to protect liberty. Our Constitution, by careful design, prescribes a process for making law, and within that process there are many accountability checkpoints….It would dash the whole scheme if Congress could give its power away to an entity that is not constrained by those checkpoints.”
– Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in a separate opinion on Monday, when the Supreme Court ruled that Amtrak, the operator of the nation’s passenger trains, is a part of the government but must stay within limits of its power to impose regulation on other parts of the railroad industry as it seeks to make its trains run on time.
“At issue in this case is the proper division between legislative and executive powers. An examination of the history of those powers reveals how far our modern separation-of-powers jurisprudence has departed from the original meaning of the Constitution.
– Justice Clarence Thomas, in his own separate opinion on Monday in the Amtrak case.”
With this opening, Congress needs to make the alphabet submit the all proposed regulations for Congressional scrutiny. If it means gridlock and no new regulations so be it.All members of the court made clear, in the three separate opinions that emerged, that merely being a part of government did not free Amtrak from constitutional limitations. Far from it. The main opinion written by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, and separate opinions by Justices Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and Clarence Thomas, made clear that this experiment by Congress might still fail under some version of the separation-of-powers notion that lies behind the “non-delegation doctrine.”
As a part of the government, the opinions said, Amtrak had to be kept within the bounds of what Executive Branch officials are allowed to do under the Constitution. Its officers had to be selected in the way the Constitution mandates, and it had to carry out any duties assigned to it by Congress in a way that respects the separation of legislative and executive authority.
