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Republican or Democrat, who could seriously disagree.
Kavanaugh, Mueller and efforts to have it both ways on Morrison (Steve Vladeck, Lawfare)
Even if it’s a bit surprising that he said the quiet part out loud, it shouldn’t come as any great shock that Judge Brett Kavanaugh thinks the Supreme Court’s 1988 decision in Morrison v. Olson is wrongly decided—and is his best example of a prior decision that should be overruled. Morrison, which upheld the constitutionality of the independent counsel provisions of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, has long been a lightning rod for conservatives, who have rallied around Justice Antonin Scalia’s fiery and pellucid (if itself controversial) solo dissent. And Kavanaugh has repeatedly criticized the decision in his judicial writings, most prominently in a 2016 panel opinion striking down the single-director structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (the en banc D.C. Circuit overruled Kavanaugh in January, although the Fifth Circuit disagreed on Monday—teeing up the issue for the Supreme Court).
Instead, the real headline here is the lengths to which the White House and some of Kavanaugh’s outside defenders are going to suggest that his comments have no bearing on the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller (rather than viewing the comments as a feature vis-à-vis Mueller instead of a bug)…. In footnote 3 of his opinion dissenting from the en banc D.C. Circuit’s ruling in the CFPB case, Judge Kavanaugh himself made a similar observation: “The independent counsel is, of course, distinct from the traditional special counsels who are appointed by the Attorney General for particular matters. Those special counsels ordinarily report to and are removable by the Attorney General or the Deputy Attorney General.”
As it turns out, this is the exact argument that has been offered by supporters of S. 2644, the so-called Mueller protection bill (the Special Counsel Independence and Integrity Act), which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on a 14-7 vote in April. I’m one of them. As I wrote in my testimony to the committee in support of the legislation last September.
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Suffice it to say, you can’t have it both ways. If Kavanaugh and other critics believe that Morrison was wrongly decided only because of all the problematic features of the independent counsel statute added together, then (1) I agree that the special counsel just doesn’t raise the same concerns; and (2) critics of the legislation should admit that there is therefore no remaining constitutional argument against passage of the far-more-modest Mueller protection bill. But if the principal constitutional problem in Morrison was the “good cause” limitation on the removal of an inferior executive-branch prosecutor, then (1) the special counsel raises exactly the same concern; and (2) Kavanaugh’s remarks about Morrison do bear directly on the constitutionality of Mueller’s independence. After all, even without passage of S. 2644, the executive branch is bound to follow its own regulations (which similarly require “good cause” for Mueller’s removal) until and unless they are duly rescinded.
I don’t mean to hide the ball; overruling Morrison (especially if Humphrey’s Executor is next) could have dramatic and far-reaching consequences for the administrative state, much of whose architecture and functioning depends on the existence of quasi-independent agencies that are, unlike Cabinet departments, at least somewhat insulated from direct political control by the president. In that regard, the larger implications of Kavanaugh’s views if they become those of the Supreme Court majority will almost certainly be felt elsewhere. But if Kavanaugh supporters truly believe that his hostility toward Morrison doesn’t and shouldn’t have any bearing on the ongoing special counsel investigation into President Trump, then it seems to me that they are implicitly (but correctly) conceding that the rightness or wrongness of Morrison similarly has no bearing on whether Congress should pass S. 2644.