Cite as: 510 U. S. 163 (1994)
Souter, J., concurring
judges.6 And the method for appointing military judges allows the President no formal role at all in the selection of the particular individuals who will actually serve in those positions. This process likewise deprives the public of any realistic ability to hold easily identifiable elected officials to account for bad appointments. Thus while, as the Court explains, see ante, at 171-172, Congress has certainly attempted to create a single military office that includes the potential of service as a military judge, I believe the Appointments Clause forbids the creation of such a single office that combines inferior- and principal-officer roles, thereby disregarding the special treatment the Constitution requires for the appointment of principal officers. For these reasons, if military judges were principal officers, the current scheme for appointing them would raise a serious Appointments Clause problem indeed, as the Solicitor General conceded at oral argument. See Tr. of Oral Arg. 30-31.
D
The argument that military judges are principal officers is far from frivolous. It proceeds by analogizing military judges to Article III circuit and district judges, who are principal officers,7 and to Article I Tax Court judges, who Frey-6 Writing in 1953, one observer pointed out that if each of the 49,956 nominations for military office sent to the Senate in 1949 "were considered for one minute . . . , it would require 832 hours to pass upon the nominations [or] an average of more than 5 hours each day that the Senate is in session." Harris, Advice and Consent of the Senate, at 331. This observer concluded that "Senate confirmation of military and naval officers has become for all practical purposes an empty formality." Ibid.
7 It is true that the Court has never so held and that the Constitution refers to the lower federal courts as "inferior Courts." Art. III, § 1. But from the early days of the Republic "[t]he practical construction has uniformly been that [judges of the inferior courts] are not . . . inferior officers," 3 J. Story, Commentaries on the Constitution 456, n. 1 (1833), and I doubt many today would disagree. In Freytag, indeed, the Court as-
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