GORSUCH CHALLENGES BLANK CHECK FOR THE U.S. ATTORNEY GENERAL.

AuthorRoot, Damon
PositionLAW

IN OCTOBER, THE U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in an important case that asks whether Congress violated Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution by delegating its lawmaking authority to the executive branch.

That question is at the heart of Gundy v. United States, in which convicted sex offender Herman Avery Gundy is challenging the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act of 2006 (SORNA), which among other things requires convicted sex offenders to register, check in periodically in person, and share personal information with the authorities.

The law also contains this provision: "The Attorney General shall have the authority to specify the applicability of the requirements of this subchapter to sex offenders convicted before the enactment of this chapter." In other words, Congress left it up to the A.G. to determine how to deal with the estimated 500,000 individuals whose sex crime convictions predate SORNA's passage.

"SORNA's delegation provision grants unguided power to the nation's top prosecutor to expand the scope of criminal laws and to impose burdensome, sometimes life time registration requirements on hundreds of thousands of individuals," Sarah Baumgartel, Gundy's attorney, told the Supreme Court in October. That delegation of power, Baumgartel maintained, "combines criminal law-making and executive power in precisely the way that the Constitution was designed to prohibit."

If we read between the lines of the oral arguments, a couple of members of the Supreme Court seemed to be leaning toward siding with...

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