Immigration & Naturalization Service v. Chadha

Majority reasoning

The majority, led by Chief Justice Burger, held that the one-house veto was "essentially legislative in purpose and effect" because it altered Chadha's legal rights, duties, and status as well as the Attorney General's authority. Because it was legislative in character, and did not fall into any of the four narrow, textually explicit situations where the Constitution lets one house act alone (impeachment, impeachment trial, Senate confirmation, treaty ratification), it had to comply with Article I's requirement of bicameral passage and presentment to the President. The Court emphasized that the Framers deliberately made lawmaking a slow, "finely wrought" process shared between two houses and the President specifically to guard against arbitrary or ill-considered exercises of power, and that convenience or efficiency cannot excuse departure from that design. Responding to Justice White's argument that the Attorney General's suspension itself functions like a legislative proposal so that congressional silence is equivalent to bicameral approval, the majority rejected this analogy as effectively rewriting Article I to allow lawmaking by mere silence, which the constitutional text does not permit. The Court also rejected the argument that Congress's plenary power over naturalization made the case a nonjusticiable political question, holding that whether Congress chose a constitutional method of exercising that power is a judicial question.

Dissent reasoning

Justice White argued that the legislative veto is a critical and widely used tool — found in nearly 200 statutes — that lets Congress delegate broad authority to the executive and agencies while retaining a check on how that authority is exercised, and that invalidating it wholesale is an unnecessarily sweeping outcome. He contended the Attorney General's suspension of deportation functions as a proposal for legislative change, so that a one-house veto within the statutory period simply denies bicameral approval, fully satisfying Article I's purposes, since no change in Chadha's status could occur without the agreement of the Attorney General and both houses acting through their respective approval or silence. White also argued that if Congress may delegate broad legislative-type power to agencies without full bicameral passage, it makes little sense to forbid Congress from reserving a lesser check on that same delegated power for itself. Separately, Justice Rehnquist, joined by Justice White, dissented on severability, arguing that Congress's history of insisting on some form of veto over deportation suspensions shows it never intended to let the Attorney General suspend deportations without a congressional check, so the veto provision should not be severed from the rest of the statute — meaning Chadha's suspension should have failed entirely rather than being upheld with the veto excised.