Separation of Powers

Ron Fodé never planned to be a farmer. But in 1984, his father suffered a brain aneurysm and could no longer run the family's farm in Grant County, Washington. Ron packed up his life as a student at Washington State University and came home to help. The learning curve was steep. He had to teach himself how to grow potatoes, onions, wheat, and s ...

Eighty years ago, in June 1946, Congress passed the Administrative Procedure Act. It was hailed by one of its principal drafters, Sen. Patrick McCarran, D-Nev., as "a bill of rights for the hundreds of thousands of Americans whose affairs are controlled or regulated" by federal agencies. In the intervening years, the APA has too often failed to ...

For nearly a century, federal law barred the president from firing members of the Federal Trade Commission unless they could be shown to have committed "inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office." The goal of this congressionally imposed restriction was to give agencies like the FTC some measure of independence from politics. But the ...

This month marks the 811th anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, an event regarded by many as the foundation of the English Constitution and an inspiration for American independence. Magna Carta's lore has taken on a legendary quality over time, but the tale of the rebel barons compelling the tyrant King John to affix his seal to a document ...

"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." James Madison wrote these words in The Federalist 47 in 1788 after the Constitutional Convention had deliberately divided the three main powers of government among thr ...

This week, America lost one of the foremost historians of the American Founding with the passing of Brown University professor Gordon S. Wood. For half a century, Wood helped shape how scholars and ordinary people understood the Revolution, the Founding Fathers, and the ideas that united 13 British colonies into one nation. Through his work, ...

Floyd Johnson served in the U.S. Army from 1983 to 1985 and was honorably discharged after a training exercise in Germany turned deadly. Decades later, while incarcerated in Florida, he was diagnosed with PTSD. The VA rates disabilities on a scale from 0% to 100%, measuring how severely a condition impairs a veteran's ability to function in dail ...

Is a truck-repair shop a mine? Yes, according to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In a divided decision, the D.C. Circuit ruled that KC Transport's maintenance facility in Emmett, W.Va.—a gravel lot serving as a repair shop—qualifies as a "mine" under the Federal Mine Safety and Health Act. This means the Mine Saf ...

Federal agencies repeatedly govern Americans through documents that are not supposed to carry the force of law. In theory, these "guidance documents" should merely explain how an agency is interpreting existing statutes and regulations. In practice, however, they often function as a shortcut around the lawmaking and rulemaking processes. That sh ...