828
Opinion of the Court
at 173 ("This Court has, since the Tenure of Office Act, manifested an earnest desire to avoid a final settlement of the question until it should be inevitably presented, as it is here").
If the appellees in the present case have standing, presumably President Wilson, or Presidents Grant and Cleveland before him, would likewise have had standing, and could have challenged the law preventing the removal of a Presidential appointee without the consent of Congress. Similarly, in INS v. Chadha, 462 U. S. 919 (1983), the Attorney General would have had standing to challenge the one-House veto provision because it rendered his authority provisional rather than final. By parity of reasoning, President Gerald Ford could have sued to challenge the appointment provisions of the Federal Election Campaign Act which were struck down in Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U. S. 1 (1976) (per curiam), and a Member of Congress could have challenged the validity of President Coolidge's pocket veto that was sustained in The Pocket Veto Case, 279 U. S. 655 (1929).
There would be nothing irrational about a system that granted standing in these cases; some European constitutional courts operate under one or another variant of such a regime. See, e. g., Favoreu, Constitutional Review in Europe, in Constitutionalism and Rights 38, 41 (L. Henkin & A. Rosenthal eds. 1990); Wright Sheive, Central and Eastern European Constitutional Courts and the Antimajoritarian Objection to Judicial Review, 26 Law & Pol'y Int'l Bus. 1201, 1209 (1995); A. Stone, The Birth of Judicial Politics in France 232 (1992); D. Kommers, Judicial Politics in West Germany: A Study of the Federal Constitutional Court 106 (1976). But it is obviously not the regime that has obtained under our Constitution to date. Our regime contemplates a more restricted role for Article III courts, well expressed by Justice Powell in his concurring opinion in United States v. Richardson, 418 U. S. 166 (1974):
Page: Index Previous 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007