alt Hacker News>Can Congress create a law that provides for judicial law clerks to exercise power “independent” of Article III judges? No. It’s an extremely easy question. Myers v. United States got the right answer almost 100 years ago.
Article I courts arguably exercise judicial power independently of the Article III judges.
But if you want to go down the separation of powers route, you'll need to break up many federal agencies to separate their legislative and judicial functions from their executive duties. That was the basis of Humphreys Excecutor, which btw was decided by largely the same court as in Myers. Humphreys (and later in Morrison v Olson) recognized that federal agencies can in practice perform "quasi-legislative" and "quasi-judicial" functions, not just law enforcement duties. There is for example a body of law governing rulemaking by agencies. Even CJ Roberts observed during the oral arguments of Trump v Slaughter that an agency's functions might span all three categories of government power -- executive, legislative, judicial -- to various degrees.
If separation of powers is to prevent Congress from wielding executive power, it should likewise preclude a president from laying claim to the other categories of power.
Article I courts don’t exercise the “judicial power.” https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-3/sec...
They exercise adjudicatory powers that Congress could otherwise provide to be handled directly by the executive or private bills. When a case involves an actual Article III issue, Article I courts need to kick it over to an Article III tribunal: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/564/462/
The terms “quasi-judicial” and “quasi-legislative” do not mean “judicial” and “legislative,” they mean “executive.” For example, the legal fiction allowing executive agencies to make rules is that those rules are simply structuring what they could do with executive authority anyway.
So separation of powers actually cuts in the opposite direction with respect to quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial powers. So when the SEC prosecutes you in front of an ALJ for violating an SEC rule, it isn’t actually exercising judicial or legislative powers. It’s just laying out those structures for what it could do through some guy making an executive decision. That’s the only reason the SEC is constitutional. Given that, Congress shouldn’t be able to limit the President’s supervision over what’s notionally an exercise of executive power.