Chadha and the "Legislative Veto"

Here is the problem. Congress passes lots of laws with general rules, and then delegates to administrative agencies--unelected bureaucrats--the power to promulgate specific rules carrying out the general prescriptions.

Some argue that these rules promulgated by Executive agencies are unconstitutional "laws" that have not been enacted by Congress. In other words, these "rules" look more like the work of the legislative branch than the executive branch. But the Court has basically allowed agency rulemaking, at least where Congress has enacted general guidelines. For example, in the Health Care Law, Congress generally required "women's preventive" health care to be included in all policies, but it is Secretary Sebelius and HHS that promulgated a rule requiring contraceptives and abortafacients to be included and also the rule deciding which religious institutions were exempted from the requirement.

Chadha deals with a provision in the Immigration Act that authorizes "one House of Congress, by resolution, to invalidate the decision of the Executive Branch...to allow a particular deportable alien to remain in the United States,"

In this case, the House of Representatives, acting alone by resolution, voted to reverse the Attorney General's decision to suspend the deportation of Mr. Chadha.

Issue: "[W]hether action of one House of Congress...violates strictures of the Constitution" and in particular the Presentment and Bicameralism clause of Article I, section 7:

Every bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a law, be presented to the President of the United States; if he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the objections at large on their journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the bill, it shall be sent, together with the objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a law.

What does the Court hold? Why?

What do you think of Justice White's dissent on page 384, referring to the "Hobson's choice"  Congress must face when it passes complex laws for a complex world?