Constitutional Law; Keeping Government’s 3 Arms Minding Their Own Business
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In a city of lawyers that abounds with every legal specialty a creative profession can devise, Alan B. Morrison has carved out a singular niche. His specialty is the separation of powers, the constitutional relationship among the three branches of the Federal Government. In a city of lawyers that abounds with every legal specialty a creative profession can devise, Alan B. Morrison has carved out a singular niche. His specialty is the separation of powers, the constitutional relationship among the three branches of the Federal Government. In Mr. Morrison’s view, that relationship is regularly thrown out of balance when one branch encroaches on another or seeks to evade some burdensome constitutional duties of its own. With impressive frequency, the courts have agreed with him and the other lawyers of the Public Citizen Litigation Group, a nonprofit law operation he set up with Ralph Nader in 1972 and has run since then. For example, Mr. Morrison helped persuade the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional the legislative veto and a vital provision of the 1985 budget-balancing law. In both those decisions, the Court ruled that Congress had exceeded its constitutional prerogatives, in the first case through a device that let one or both houses of Congress block an executive branch agency’s regulations, and in the second by giving the Comptroller General, an official answerable to Congress, wielding the executive power to impose spending cuts to meet deficit targets. Can’t Win ‘Em All More : query.nytimes.com |