Americana Administrative Law

• Author: Beau J. Baumann
• Position: Appellate Attorney, United States Department of Justice
• Pages: 465-527

Americana Administrative Law

BEAU J. BAUMANN*

Appellate Attorney, United States Department of Justice. © 2023, Beau J. Baumann. The views

expressed in this Article are mine alone. I appreciate the helpful feedback and encouragement I received

from Josh Chafetz, Daniel Walters, Allen C. Sumrall, Kannappan Sampath, Casey Chalbeck, Ali Shan

Ali Bhai, and Victoria Inojosa. Josh deserves special thanks for his years of helpful mentorship and for

teaching me much of what I know about Congress. I also deeply appreciate the willingness of Chris

Walker and Emile Shehada to run a blog post discussing this Article in the Yale Journal on Regulation

Notice & Comment blog. See Beau J. Baumann, Americana Administrative Law, YALE J. ON REGUL.:

NOTICE & COMMENT (Feb. 17, 2022), https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/americana-administrative-law-by-

beau-j-baumann/ [https://perma.cc/BU8R-YF77]. Finally, I appreciate the hard work of the students at

The Georgetown Law Journal, whose work continually exceeded my wildest expectations.

On January 13, 2022, the Supreme Court blocked the Biden

Administration’s vaccine-or-test mandate, a measure meant to save thou-

sands of lives amid a once-in-a-century pandemic. Justice Gorsuch’s

concurrence suggested that the Court’s decision vindicated the nondele-

gation doctrine, even if indirectly. Gorsuch argued that Congress could

not be left to its own devices because open-ended delegations corrupt

congressional incentives. The Gorsuch concurrence marks the triumph

of a new pitch for judicial self-aggrandizement this Article calls

“Americana administrative law.” Rather than hyping the threat of execu-

tive aggrandizement, nondelegationists are deploying cynical and decli-

nist notions of Congress to justify judicial self-aggrandizement. The

“Americana” in Americana administrative law comes from nondelega-

tionists’ attempt to restore an idealized Congress that has never worked

as cleanly as they suppose. Beyond the nondelegation doctrine, the

administrative law literature often justifies judicial interventions with

claims of congressional “gridlock,” partisanship, and decline.

This Article has two main contributions. First, this Article describes

the rise of Americana administrative law from the “constitutional poli-

tics” around the nondelegation doctrine. I provide a genealogy for this

approach and frame it as a pitch for judicial self-aggrandizement.

Second, this Article provides a corrective. The courts are neither above

nor outside separation-of-powers conflicts. They are instead participants

in the ongoing interbranch contest for the ability to determine outcomes.

Americana administrative law ignores much of what we know about

Congress. Congress is an evolving body at the end of a centuries-long

experiment with legislatures. It has developed “hard” and “soft” powers

that allow it to realize its agenda and defend itself from the other

branches. This Article argues that the law and the literature should drop

the pretense that judicial doctrine can “fix” an institution as complex as

Congress.

*

465

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467

I. THE CENTRALITY OF CONGRESS IN OUR ADMINISTRATIVE LAW . . . . . . . . 477

A. CONGRESS AS A SUBJECT AND AN OBJECT OF ADMINISTRATIVE LAW

DOCTRINE.............................................. 477

B. EPICYCLES OF ANTI-ADMINISTRATIVISM AND CONGRESSIONAL

DECLINISM............. ................................ 482

II. THE TRIUMPH OF AMERICANA ADMINISTRATIVE LAW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 486

A. AMERICANA ADMINISTRATIVE LAW IN THE ACADEMY . . . . . . . . . . . 487

B. AMERICANA ADMINISTRATIVE LAW IN THE COURTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . 490

1. Disdain for the Political Branches. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 490

2. Disdain for Legislative Politics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 491

3. Americana Administrative Law and Justice Gorsuch . . . 494

III. THE CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICS OF THE NONDELEGATION DOCTRINE: THE

RISE OF AMERICANA ADMINISTRATIVE LAW. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 498

A. THE EXECUTIVE FRAME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 502

B. THE CONGRESSIONAL FRAME . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 504

1. Early Beginnings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 506

2. Neomi Rao’s Collective Congress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 508

3. Doubling Down . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 514

IV. CONGRESS AS A LEGISLATURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515

A. CONGRESS AS AN EVOLVING ENTITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 518

B. CONGRESSIONAL CAPACITY: WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CONGRESS . . . 521

1. Productivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 522

2. Oversight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 524

3. Appropriations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 524

4. Last Thoughts on the Collective Congress . . . . . . . . . . . 525

CONCLUSION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 526

466 THE GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 111:465

INTRODUCTION

In November 2021, the Biden Administration mandated that businesses with at

least 100 employees require either full COVID-19 vaccinations or weekly

COVID-19 testing as a condition of employment.

1

The Biden Administration

drew on delegated authority under the Occupational Safety and Health Act of

1970 (OSH Act).

2

The Supreme Court blocked the mandate in January 2022.

3

It

applied the major questions doctrine, which requires that Congress speak clearly

when delegating power of economic or political significance.

4

As a result, a man-

date meant to save thousands of lives never went into effect.

5

To block the mandate, the Court had to use a more aggressive version of the

major questions doctrine.

6

As Cass Sunstein has suggested, there are now two

major questions doctrines much as there are two canons of constitutional avoid-

ance.

7

A few months before the vaccine-or-test case, the Court framed the major

questions doctrine as a rule of construction.

8

Construction is how we give meaning

to vague text after determining the text’s linguistic meaning or semantic content.

9

If, after a text is interpreted, the relevant statute is still vague, then rules of con-

struction will carry the day.

10

The Supreme Court’s per curiam opinion in the vac-

cine-or-test case applied the major questions doctrine more like a supercharged

1. See Nat’l Fed’n of Indep. Bus. v. Dep’t of Lab., 142 S. Ct. 661, 663 (2022) (per curiam) (the

“vaccine-or-test case”).

2. See id.; see also 29 U.S.C. §§ 651–678.

3. See Nat’l Fed’n of Indep. Bus., 142 S. Ct. at 663. By statute, the courts consolidated challenges to

the vaccine-or-test requirement in the Sixth Circuit, which dissolved another court’s stay of the

requirement. See id. at 664 (citing In re MCP No. 165, 21 F.4th 357 (6th Cir. 2021)). The Supreme Court

granted emergency relief and stayed the requirement’s enforcement. See id. at 662. The Court’s per

curiam opinion effectively ended the litigation around the requirement.

4. See id. at 665.

5. See id. at 666 (noting that the federal government projected, before the Omicron variant, that the

vaccine mandate would save over 6,500 lives).

6. See Cass R. Sunstein, There Are Two “Major Questions” Doctrines, 73 ADMIN. L. REV. 475, 477

(2021) (comparing two versions of the major questions doctrine, one “weak” and the other “strong”).

7. See id. (explaining that the weak doctrine cabins deference to agency interpretations while the

strong doctrine dictates that agencies “will lose” when they construe statutory ambiguity to give them

new powers); Caleb Nelson, Avoiding Constitutional Questions Versus Avoiding Unconstitutionality,

128 HARV. L. REV. F. 331, 332 (2015) (discussing two different versions of constitutional avoidance

doctrine: one for avoiding actual unconstitutionality and the other for avoiding serious constitutional

questions).

8. See Ala. Ass’n of Realtors v. Dep’t of Health & Hum. Servs., 141 S. Ct. 2485, 2488–89 (2021)

(per curiam) (describing the major questions doctrine as a rule of construction in a case about an early

COVID response measure) (the “eviction moratorium” case).

9. See Lawrence B. Solum, The Interpretation-Construction Distinction, 27 CONST. COMMENT. 95,

96 (2010).

10. See Kisor v. Wilkie, 139 S. Ct. 2400, 2414 (2019) (instructing, in the context of Auer deference,

that “deference can arise only if a regulation is genuinely ambiguous” and emphasizing that “when we

use that term we mean it—genuinely ambiguous, even after a court has resorted to all the standard tools

of interpretation”).

2023] AMERICANA ADMINISTRATIVE LAW 467