alt Hacker NewsArticle 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.
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The administrative law proceeding is a judicial proceeding. Its purpose is to determine whether someone has violated the rules created by the SEC. It's fundamentally no different than a court proceeding to determine whether someone has violated the criminal code. Both are trying to decide "were the rules broken, and if so, what should be the penalty?"
A fundamental principle in any legal system is that no one can be the judge in his own case. But if the ALJs and the SEC rulemakers are under the direct control of the president, then the president is effectively performing legislation, prosecution, and adjudication all at once. The president could keep sacking ALJs until he finds one willing to issue his favored ruling. That is precisely the kind of scenario that separation of powers seeks to avert.
P.S. Regarding the SEC, SEC v Jarkesy (2024) curtailed the use of ALJs by the SEC, holding that the SEC proceedings in question were basically like any other lawsuit so as to trigger the Constitutional protections afforded to defendants. If the Sup Ct goes down the unitary executive route, SEC v Jarkesy should be the first of many cases to challenge the structure of federal agencies.