Jesse M. Cross† & Abbe R. Gluck

ARTICLE THE CONGRESSIONAL BUREAUCRACY JESSE M. CROSS† & ABBE R. GLUCK†† INTRODUCTION ........................................................................... !"#$ I. THE BUREAUCRACY’S INSTITUTIONS: COMMON ORIGINS IN SEPARATION OF POWERS AND PRESENT-DAY OPERATIONS ..... !""" A. Congressional Research Service .................................................... !"%& B. O!ces of the Legislative Counsel .................................................. !"%$ C. O!ce of the Law Revision Counsel .............................................. !"%' D. Congressional Budget O!ce (CBO) ............................................... !"'$ E. Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) .............................................. !"'( F. O!ces of the Parliamentarians ...................................................... !"($ G. Government Accountability O!ce (GAO) ..................................... !"(' H. MedPAC and MACPAC ........................................................... !")# II. THE BUREAUCRACY’S FEATURES AND FUNCTIONS ................. !%&& A. The Standard Account ............................................................... !%&& B. How the Congressional Bureaucracy Intervenes in This Account ....... !%&" † Assistant Professor, University of South Carolina Law School. †† Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy, Yale Law School. Soren Schmidt, Yale Law School Class of $%$%, was our outstanding partner on an earlier version of this Article; he was instrumental in working as our partner in conceptualizing it, doing the &rst round of interviews, and working with us to write the &rst draft. We are grateful to Josh Chafetz, Douglas Elmendorf, Bill Eskridge, Sherry Glied, Ed Grossman, Rick Hills, Anne Joseph O'Connell, Nick Parrillo, George Yin, Kevin Kosar, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Nina Kohn, participants at the NYU Public Law Workshop, faculty workshops at the University of North Carolina, Seton Hall, and Yale law schools, participants at the $%$% Legislation Works-in-Progress Roundtable, and Yale Law School students Josh Feinzig, Sumer Ghazala, Hilary Higgins, Jade Ford, and Natasha Khan. This Article was also presented at the Gray Center $%$% Roundtable on Congress and the Administrative State, and we are appreciative of support and comments received there. Finally, we are deeply grateful to the editors at the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and to all the current and former sta'ers who spoke with us con&dentially. (!"#!) !"#* University of Pennsylvania Law Review [Vol. !%(: !"#! !. Internal Separation of Powers ............................................. !%&( B. Di"erent Types and Structures of Congressional Bureaucratic Expertise .................................................................................. !%!* !. Nonpartisanship .................................................................. !%!$ *. Specialization and Long Tenure .......................................... !%!% $. Nonpartisan Is Not Necessarily Position-Neutral or Non Substantive ....................................................................... !%*! #. Policy Versus Procedure ..................................................... !%*# ". Con+dential Versus Transparent: “The Atmosphere Has Changed” ......................................................................... !%*" %. Authoritative Versus Permissive ......................................... !%*( '. Trust with Low Salience Tasks: Why OLRC? “No Members Know We’re Here” ........................................... !%$& (. Timing .............................................................................. !%$* III. LEGISLATION AND STATUTORY INTERPRETATION THEORY .... !%$$ A. What the Congressional Bureaucracy Tells Us About Congress’s Rationality and Changes in Modern Lawmaking ........................... !%$( B. Unorthodox Lawmaking Is the New Orthodox Lawmaking: Implications for Understanding Statutes ........................................ !%#& !. Congress Is Still Informed in Key Ways .............................. !%#& *. New Timing and “Preconference”—and Their Challenges for Textualists .................................................................. !%#$ $. More Mistakes and Gaps .................................................... !%#" #. Highly Specific, Negotiated, Language Used to Clear Procedural Hurdles ........................................................... !%#% ". Less Legislative History .................................................... !%#' %. More Visibility and Politicization ....................................... !%#( C. What Does the Supreme Court Think About Unorthodox Lawmaking? ............................................................................ !%#( IV. DOCTRINAL IMPLICATIONS AND STATUTORY "DECONSTRUCTION" .............................................................. !%"! A. Deconstructing the Concept of “a Statute” ...................................... !%"$ B. What You Think Is the “Statute” Is Not; OLRC As a Deeper Example .................................................................................. !%"% !. When You Open the U.S Code You Only See About Half of Enacted Statutory Law ................................................. !%"% *. Text Is Added, Edited, and Rearranged After Enactment .... !%%# $. Yates v. United States—A Legislation Chestnut Misunderstood ................................................................. !%%( #. Positive v. Nonpositive Law ............................................... !%'& C. New Canons, Canons, Canons .................................................... !%'# *&*&] #e Congressional Bureaucracy !"#$ !. The CBO Canon—And Now, the JCT Canon, OLRC Canon, Parliamentarian’s Canon ....................................... !%'% D. Anti-Canons ............................................................................. !%') !. Drop Canons on Code Organization ................................... !%') *. Drop Grammar Canons ...................................................... !%(& $. Drop Anti-Purpose Canons and Recognize Congress’s Own Instructions to Construe Purposively ................................. !%(! #. Drop the Whole-Code Canons ........................................... !%(* CONCLUSION ............................................................................... !%(* INTRODUCTION Congress has a bureaucracy. Legal scholarship, judicial discourse, and doctrine about Congress and statutes have focused almost entirely on elected members of Congress and the ascertainability of their purported intentions about policymaking and statutory language. In recent years, we and others have broadened that perspective, with new scholarship about the on-the-ground realities of the congressional drafting process—including the essential role that staff plays in that process—and have argued the relevance of those realities for theory and doctrine.1 Here we go deeper. This Article goes beyond our previous accounts of partisan committee sta,, congressional counsels, and other select sta, o-ces to introduce the broader concept of what we call the congressional bureaucracy. The congressional bureaucracy is the collection of approximately a dozen nonpartisan o-ces that, while typically unseen by the public and largely ignored by courts and practicing lawyers, provides the specialized expertise 1 See generally Lisa Schultz Bressman & Abbe R. Gluck, Statutory Interpretation from the Inside— An Empirical Study of Congressional Drafting, Delegation, and the Canons: Part II, (( STAN. L. REV. )$" ($%!#) (studying drafting practices of congressional counsels and the assumptions they make about judicial interpretation); Jesse M. Cross, Legislative History in the Modern Congress, ") HARV. J. LEGIS. *! ($%$%); Jesse M. Cross, The Sta!er’s Error Doctrine, "( HARV. J. LEGIS. +, ($%!*); Jesse M. Cross, When Courts Should Ignore Statutory Text, $( GEO. MASON L. REV. #", ($%!+); Abbe R. Gluck, Congress, Statutory Interpretation, and the Failure of Formalism: The CBO Canon and Other Ways that Courts Can Improve on What They Are Already Trying to Do, +# U. CHI. L. REV. !)) ($%!)) (defending an approach based on congressional process and calling attention to the role of the Law Revision Counsel and Congressional Budget O-ce in drafting statutes) [hereinafter Gluck, Statutory Interpretation]; Abbe R. Gluck & Lisa Schultz Bressman, Statutory Interpretation from the Inside—An Empirical Study of Congressional Drafting, Delegation, and the Canons: Part I, (" STAN. L. REV. *%! ($%!,); Abbe R. Gluck, Anne Joseph O’Connell, & Rosa Po, Unorthodox Lawmaking, Unorthodox Rulemaking, !!" COLUM. L. REV. !)+* ($%!") (detailing recent deviations from traditional legislative and processes and their implications for doctrine and theory); Abbe R. Gluck, The “CBO Canon” and the Debate Over Tax Credits on Federally Operated Health Insurance Exchanges, BALKINIZATION (July $%, $%!$), https://balkin.blogspot.com/$%!$/%)/cbo-canon-and-debate-over-tax-credits.html (introducing concept of CBO canon) [hereinafter Gluck, CBO Canon]. !"## University of Pennsylvania Law Review [Vol. !%(: !"#! that helps make congressional lawmaking possible. In the process, the bureaucracy furthers Congress’s own internal separation of powers and safeguards the legislative process from executive and interest-group encroachment. These institutions internal to Congress use bureaucracy’s traditional tools—including nonpartisanship and technical expertise—to separate powers both inside of Congress and external to it. But they do

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