Cite as: 510 U. S. 163 (1994)
Souter, J., concurring
"[t]he structural interests protected by the Appointments Clause are not those of any one branch of Government but of the entire Republic," and "[n]either Congress nor the Executive can agree to waive th[e] structural protection[s]" the Clause provides. Freytag, 501 U. S., at 880. The Appointments Clause forbids both aggrandizement and abdication.5
C
If military judges were principal officers, the method for selecting them, which is prescribed in legislation adopted by
adopted by Congress and signed by the President, the Court said that the law would nevertheless violate the Appointments Clause if the independent counsel were a principal officer. See id., at 671. If the independent counsel were such an officer, the law would represent an impermissible abdication by both Congress and the President of their Appointments Clause duties.
5 Cf. J. W. Hampton, Jr., & Co. v. United States, 276 U. S. 394, 406 (1928) (Taft, C. J.) ("[I]t is a breach of the National fundamental law if Congress gives up its legislative power and transfers it to the President, or to the Judicial branch, or if by law it attempts to invest itself or its members with either executive power or judicial power"). As Chief Justice Taft's remark suggests, the ready analogy to the Appointments Clause's anti-abdication principle is what has been called "nondelegation doctrine." The Court has unanimously invalidated legislation in which Congress delegated "to others the essential legislative functions with which it is . . . vested," A. L. A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U. S. 495, 529 (1935); id., at 553-554 (Cardozo, J., concurring), and it has read other statutes narrowly to avoid annulling them as excessive abdications of constitutional responsibility, see Industrial Union Dept., AFL-CIO v. American Petroleum Institute, 448 U. S. 607, 646 (1980) (plurality opinion); National Cable Television Assn., Inc. v. United States, 415 U. S. 336, 342 (1974). See also Industrial Union Dept., supra, at 672-676 (Rehnquist, J., concurring in judgment) (discussing limits on the delegation of Congress's legislative power). Nondelegation doctrine has been criticized. But see J. Ely, Democracy and Distrust 131-134 (1980) (distinguishing non-delegation doctrine from less defensible theories invoked to strike down New Deal legislation). Barring Appointments Clause abdication strikes me as plainly less problematic, however, because the text of the Constitution describes with precision the nature of the branches' appointments powers.
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