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Klukowski: Scalia Says Bills to Protect Special Counsel from Firing are Unconstitutional 

By: monkeytrots in CONSTITUTION | Recommend this post (3)
Mon, 02 Oct 17 3:41 AM | 316 view(s)
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Good Article - solid, Constitutional reasoning - mt agrees.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/10/01/klukowski-scalia-says-bills-to-protect-special-counsel-from-firing-are-unconstitutional/

... excerpt

Against this backdrop, it becomes clear that the legislation Congress is now considering to restrict the ability to fire a special counsel is in fact trying to revive the concept of an independent counsel, which for twenty years was authorized by the Ethics in Government Act of 1978.

But as all of these cases show, even when independent counsels were authorized by statute, they were nonetheless unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court had to perform linguistic gymnastics to uphold that statute when it was legally challenged in its 1988 case Morrison v. Olson. Yet even in doing so, the Court could not deny, “There is no real dispute that the functions performed by the independent counsel are ‘executive.’”

Justice Antonin Scalia dissented in Morrison in the most famous dissent in this area of law (called administrative law), so much so that most law students read his dissenting opinion in law school. He argued that any federal prosecutor must be removable by the president at any time.

“The Founders conspicuously and very consciously declined to sap the Executive’s strength in the same way they had weakened the Legislature: by dividing the Executive power,” Justice Scalia explained. “Proposals to have multiple executives, or a council of advisers with separate authority were rejected.”

Surprised that the statute before him was such a flagrant violation of the Constitution’s separation of powers, Justice Scalia continued:

Frequently an issue of this sort will come before the Court clad, so to speak, in sheep’s clothing: the potential of the asserted principle to effect important change in the equilibrium of power is not immediately evident, and must be discerned by a careful and perceptive analysis. But this wolf comes as a wolf.

Quoting Article II of the Constitution, which begins, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America,” Justice Scalia emphasized that “this does not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power.”

“Governmental investigation and prosecution of crimes is a quintessentially executive function,” Justice Scalia added.

... in-cerpt *s*




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