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Justice Kennedy, Youngstown, and Article II

It’s interesting to read Justice Kennedy’s concurrence in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld for signs of how Justice Kennedy would rule on the scope of the Commander-in-Chief power issues that may come come before the Court in the next few years. Much as I had expected, the opinion follows Youngstown and suggests that Congress’s views are supreme.

The key excerpts:

This is not a case, then, where the Executive can assert some unilateral authority to fill a void left by congressional inaction. It is a case where Congress, in the proper exercise of its powers as an independent branch of government, and as part of a long tradition of legislative involvement in matters of military justice, has considered the subject of military tribunals and set limits on the President’s authority. Where a statute provides the conditions for the exercise of governmental power, its requirements are the result of a deliberative and reflective process engaging both of the political branches. Respect for laws derived from the customary operation of the Executive and Legislative Branches gives some assurance of stability in time of crisis. The Constitution is best preserved by reliance on standards tested over time and insulated from the pressures of the moment.. . .

The proper framework for assessing whether Executive actions are authorized is the three-part scheme used by Justice Jackson in his opinion in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U. S. 579 (1952). “When the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate.” Id., at 635. “When the President acts in absence of either a congressional grant or denial of authority, he can only rely upon his own independent powers, but there is a zone of twilight in which he and Congress may have concurrent authority, or in which its distribution is uncertain.” Id., at 637. And “[w]hen the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb.” Ibid.

In this case, as the Court observes, the President has acted in a field with a history of congressional participation and regulation. . . . While [the laws on charging detainees] provide authority for certain forms of military courts, they also impose limitations, at least two of which control this case. If the President has exceeded these limits, this becomes a case of conflict between Presidential and congressional action—a case within Justice Jackson’s third category, not the second or first.

. . .

[A]s presently structured, Hamdan’s military commission exceeds the bounds Congress has placed on the President’s authority in §§836 and 821 of the UCMJ. Because Congress has prescribed these limits, Congress can change them, requiring a new analysis consistent with the Constitution and other governing laws. At this time, however, we must apply the standards Congress has provided. By those standards the military commission is deficient.

UPDATE: Justice Kennedy also joined the brief concurrence by Justice Breyer that states the following:

Where, as here, no emergency prevents consultation with Congress, judicial insistence upon that consultation does not weaken our Nation’s ability to deal with danger. To the contrary, that insistence strengthens the Nation’s ability to determine—through democratic means—how best to do so. The Constitution places its faith in those democratic means. Our Court today simply does the same.

ANOTHER UPDATE:  I missed this tidbit from Kennedy’s concurrence the first time around:

Trial by military commission raises separation-of-powers concerns of the highest order. Located within a single branch, these courts carry the risk that offenses will be defined, prosecuted, and adjudicated by executive officials without independent review. Cf. Loving v. United States, 517 U. S. 748, 756–758, 760 (1996) . Concentration of power puts personal liberty in peril of arbitrary action by officials, an incursion the Constitution’s three-part system is designed to avoid. It is imperative, then, that when military tribunals are established, full and proper authority exists for the Presidential directive.