The President's Enforcement Power
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University of Michigan Law School University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository Articles Faculty Scholarship 2013 The rP esident's Enforcement Power Kate Andrias University of Michigan Law School, [email protected] Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles/627 Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/articles Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, Law and Politics Commons, and the President/ Executive Department Commons Recommended Citation Andrias, Kate. "The rP esident's Enforcement Power." N. Y. U. L. Rev. 88, no. 4 (2013): 1031-125. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Articles by an authorized administrator of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. \\jciprod01\productn\N\NYU\88-4\NYU401.txt unknown Seq: 1 26-SEP-13 15:37 NEW YORK UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW VOLUME 88 OCTOBER 2013 NUMBER 4 ARTICLES THE PRESIDENT’S ENFORCEMENT POWER KATE ANDRIAS* Enforcement of law is at the core of the President’s constitutional duty to “take Care” that the laws are faithfully executed, and it is a primary mechanism for effecting national regulatory policy. Yet questions about how presidents oversee agency enforcement activity have received surprisingly little scholarly attention. This Article provides a positive account of the President’s role in administrative enforcement, explores why presidential enforcement has taken the shape it has, and examines the bounds of the President’s enforcement power. It demonstrates that presidential involvement in agency enforcement, though extensive, has been ad hoc, crisis-driven, and frequently opaque. The Article thus reveals the need for institu- tional design reforms—namely more coordination across agencies and greater dis- closure of enforcement policy. The seeds for such reforms can be found in several recent efforts that have yet to be made systematic. Concerns about politicization of law enforcement should not override the considerable benefits that would derive. Rather, by acknowledging the President’s role in, and responsibility for, enforce- ment, we can better ensure the structure and transparency that promote appropriate presidential influence. * Copyright © 2013 by Kate Andrias, Assistant Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School; formerly Associate Counsel, Special Assistant to the President, and Chief of Staff to the White House Counsel. In my former positions at the White House, I participated in some of the administrative actions discussed in the Article; those exper- iences inform my thinking, but the views expressed are my own and the discussion is based on publicly available documents. I am grateful to Kevin Arlyck, Nicholas Bagley, David Barron, Ashley Deeks, Ariela Dubler, Jamal Greene, Scott Hershovitz, Martin Kurzweil, Daniel Meltzer, David Noll, David Pozen, Daphna Renan, Judith Resnik, Kate Shaw, Reva Siegel, Peter Strauss, Charlotte Taylor, and especially to Robert Bauer, Gillian Metzger, Henry Monaghan, and Trevor Morrison. My thanks also to the editors of the New York University Law Review and to participants in workshops at Brooklyn, the University of Chicago, Columbia, Fordham, Georgetown, Harvard, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas, and the University of Virginia law schools. All errors are my own. 1031 \\jciprod01\productn\N\NYU\88-4\NYU401.txt unknown Seq: 2 26-SEP-13 15:37 1032 NEW YORK UNIVERSITY LAW REVIEW [Vol. 88:1031 INTRODUCTION ................................................. 1033 R I. ENFORCEMENT: A CORE DUTY AND POWER ........... 1041 R A. Delineating Agency Enforcement .................... 1042 R B. Constitutional Text and Structure ................... 1046 R C. Early Presidential Law Enforcement ................ 1050 R II. MODERN PRESIDENTIAL ADMINISTRATION: THE RULEMAKING-ENFORCEMENT ASYMMETRY ............. 1054 R A. The History of the Asymmetry ...................... 1055 R 1. Progressives and the New Deal: The Rise of Presidential Administration ..................... 1055 R 2. Presidents Nixon to Reagan: The Institutionalization of Centralized Regulatory Review .......................................... 1057 R 3. President Clinton: Continued Centralized Regulatory Review and New Use of Administrative Directives ........................ 1059 R 4. President George W. Bush: More Centralized Regulatory Review and Deregulation by Nonenforcement ................................ 1060 R 5. President Obama: Centralized Regulatory Review, a New Compliance Memorandum, and Announced Policies of Prosecutorial Discretion . 1064 R B. Explaining the Shape of Presidential Enforcement . 1069 R 1. Systemic Causes for Presidential Use of Enforcement Discretion ......................... 1069 R 2. Structural and Cultural Obstacles to Centralized Enforcement .................................... 1071 R 3. Ideological Obstacles to Centralized Enforcement: The Deregulatory Roots of Presidential Administration ..................... 1075 R III. THE CASE FOR REFORMING PRESIDENTIAL ENFORCEMENT .......................................... 1077 R A. The Problem of Noncoordinated Enforcement ...... 1078 R 1. When Agency Missions Overlap ................ 1078 R 2. When Agency Missions Conflict ................. 1081 R B. Advancing Efficiency and Accountability ........... 1083 R 1. Efficiency and Efficacy ......................... 1084 R 2. Democratic Accountability ...................... 1090 R 3. Objections ...................................... 1094 R C. Reforming Presidential Enforcement ................ 1101 R 1. Coordination and Disclosure .................... 1101 R 2. Presidential Enforcement in Practice ............ 1103 R IV. PRESIDENTIAL ENFORCEMENT AND PRESIDENTIAL POWER .................................................. 1107 R A. The Classic Debate: Oversight Versus Direction ..... 1108 R B. Enforcement, Law, and Politics ..................... 1111 R CONCLUSION ................................................... 1124 R \\jciprod01\productn\N\NYU\88-4\NYU401.txt unknown Seq: 3 26-SEP-13 15:37 October 2013] THE PRESIDENT’S ENFORCEMENT POWER 1033 INTRODUCTION The growth of the administrative state and the expansion of presi- dential power have been central features of American political devel- opment since the early twentieth century.1 Commentators agree: “We live today in an era of presidential administration.”2 Yet presidential administration is characterized by a strange, and largely unremarked, absence. While enforcement of law is at the very core of executive responsibility, the formal apparatus of presidential administration concerns itself little with it. No office or staff in the White House or the Executive Office of the President (EOP) attends systematically to the enforcement of rules after they have been promulgated—that is, to problems of regu- latory compliance. By contrast, a presidential office dedicated to over- seeing the process of rulemaking has been a critical component of the administrative state since the Nixon Administration. Now called the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), it is staffed by both political and career officials and is responsible for reviewing all significant rules promulgated by executive agencies. Republican and Democratic administrations alike have embraced OIRA’s central mis- sion of cost-benefit analysis. Perhaps because of this asymmetry, scholars have extensively debated presidential involvement in rulemaking,3 but they have undertaken remarkably little analysis of the President’s role in agency 1 Richard H. Pildes, Law and the President, 125 HARV. L. REV. 1381, 1383–84 (2012) (reviewing ERIC A. POSNER & ADRIAN VERMEULE, THE EXECUTIVE UNBOUND (2010)). 2 Elena Kagan, Presidential Administration, 114 HARV. L. REV. 2245, 2246 (2001); see also RICHARD P. NATHAN, THE ADMINISTRATIVE PRESIDENCY 7 (1983). Despite this con- sensus, the rise of presidential power is the subject of considerable dispute, at once cele- brated and lamented. Compare, e.g., STEVEN G. CALABRESI & CHRISTOPHER S. YOO, THE UNITARY EXECUTIVE 417 (2008) (concluding that the “sweep of history” supports the uni- tary executive theory, and urging presidents to resist certain congressional efforts to curtail executive power), and POSNER & VERMEULE, supra note 1 (arguing that the President’s power to govern has grown enormously and is largely unconstrained by law, but that politics supplies necessary checks), with BRUCE ACKERMAN, THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC (2010) (arguing that expanded presidential authority poses a grave threat to the future of the United States government), and PETER M. SHANE, MADISON’S NIGHTMARE: HOW EXECUTIVE POWER THREATENS AMERICAN DEMOCRACY (2009) (arguing that presidents’ increasingly assertive claims to unilateral authority have subverted constitutional checks and balances). 3 Regulatory review has its defenders, e.g., Steven Croley, White House Review of Agency Rulemaking: An Empirical Investigation, 70 U. CHI. L. REV. 821 (2003); Christopher C. DeMuth and Douglas H. Ginsburg, White House Review of Agency Rulemaking, 99 HARV. L. REV. 1075, 1082 (1986); Richard H. Pildes & Cass R. Sunstein, Reinventing the Regulatory State, 62 U. CHI. L. REV. 1 (1995); and its detractors, including Rena Steinzor, The Case for Abolishing Centralized White House Regulatory Review, 1 MICH. J. ENVTL. & ADMIN. L. 210 (2012). \\jciprod01\productn\N\NYU\88-4\NYU401.txt