INS v. Chadha*

Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, 462 U.S. 919 (1983), is a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling, decided 7–2 with Chief Justice Warren Burger writing for the majority, that struck down the "legislative veto" as a violation of the separation of powers. The case arose when Jagdish Rai Chadha, a Kenyan-born British subject of East Indian descent, overstayed his student visa; an immigration judge suspended his deportation under §244(c)(1) of the Immigration and Nationality Act. That statute, however, contained a one-house veto provision, §244(c)(2), allowing either chamber of Congress to override the Attorney General's suspension by simple resolution. In December 1975 the House of Representatives passed such a resolution—without debate, recorded vote, or Senate concurrence—reversing the suspension and ordering Chadha deported. The constitutional question was whether Congress could reserve to itself, or to one of its houses, a power to nullify executive action through a device that bypassed the ordinary legislative process.

The Court's reasoning rested on the formal commands of Article I. Burger held that the House's action was essentially legislative in character and effect, because it altered the legal rights and duties of persons outside the legislative branch. Under Article I, §1 and §7, any exercise of legislative power must satisfy two requirements: bicameralism—passage by both the House and the Senate—and presentment—submission of the measure to the President for signature or veto. The one-house veto satisfied neither. The framers, Burger emphasized, deliberately designed these "finely wrought and exhaustively considered" procedures (citing the Federalist Papers and the records of the Constitutional Convention) precisely to make lawmaking difficult and deliberate. Justice Byron White dissented vigorously, warning that the decision invalidated provisions in some 200 statutes and stripped Congress of an indispensable tool for controlling the modern administrative state. Justice Rehnquist dissented on severability grounds.

The practical consequence of Chadha was the sudden constitutional infirmity of legislative-veto provisions embedded in scores of statutes, including portions of the War Powers Resolution of 1973. In reality, however, Congress did not abandon the device: it continued to enact informal and committee-level veto arrangements through appropriations riders and agency reprogramming requirements, relying on inter-branch accommodation rather than judicial enforcement. The case is frequently read alongside Bowsher v. Synar (1986), which struck down a removal mechanism vesting executive functions in the Comptroller General, and Clinton v. City of New York (1998), which invalidated the Line Item Veto Act on presentment grounds, as part of a trilogy enforcing the formal architecture of separated powers.

For the FSOT US Government section, Chadha is a high-frequency item testing mastery of the separation of powers and the Article I legislative procedure. Candidates should be able to state the holding, name the two constitutional requirements (bicameralism and presentment) the legislative veto violated, identify Burger as author and White as principal dissenter, and connect the case to congressional oversight of the administrative state and the War Powers Resolution. Typical question angles ask which constitutional clauses were dispositive, or pair Chadha with Bowsher and Clinton v. New York to test formalist separation-of-powers doctrine.