The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation

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Politics,[29] but it was the celebrated Montesquieu who, by joining the idea to the notion of a "mixed constitution" of "checks and balances", in Book XI of his Spirit of the Laws, brought Aristotle's discovery to the service of the rising libertarianism of the eighteenth century. It was M

up in the following propositions: (1) There are three intrinsically distinct functions of government, the legislative, the executive, and the judicial; (2) these distinct functions ought to be exercised respectively by th

y, the delegation by Congress of legislative powers to the President; thirdly, the delegation in many instances of like powers to so-called independent agencies or commissions, in which are merged in greater or l

intervention is furnished by the need for gearing the different parts of the industrial process with one another for a planned result. In wartime this need is freely conceded by all; but its need in economic crisis is conceivably even greater, the results sought being more complex. So in the interest both of unity of design and of flexibility of detail, presidential power today takes increasing toll from both ends of the legislative process-both from the formulation of legislation and from its administration. In other words, as a barrier capable of preventing such fusion

making it on his own, usurped "legislative power" and thereby violated the principle of the Separation of Powers. In referring to this proposition, the Chief Justice (in h

say that all of the subjects concerning which laws might be made are perforce removed from the possibility of Executive influence. The E

that the Executive may move within them until they shall have been occupied by legislative action. These are not the fields of legislative prerogative, but fields within which t

estion whether one of the other departments may deal with the same subject matter according to its distinctive techniques. Indeed, were it otherwise, the action of the C

nced in Youngstown appears to have been an ad hoc discov

ure, but with "the inevitability of gradualness," for the concentration of governmental power in the United States, first in the hands of the National Government; and, secondly, in the hands of the national Executive. In the Constitutional Law which the validation of the Roosevelt program h