The Power of Separation: American Constitutionalism and the Myth of the Legislative Veto

This work challenges the notion that the 18th-century principles underlying the American separation of powers system are incompatible with the demands of 20th-century governance by questioning the dominant scholarship on the legislative veto. As a short-cut through constitutional procedure invented in the 1930s and invalidated by the Supreme Court’s Chadha decision in 1983, the legislative veto has long been presumed to have been a powerful mechanism of congressional oversight. Korn’s analysis, however, shows that commentators have exaggerated the legislative veto’s significance as a result of their incorrect assumption that the separation of powers was designed solely to check governmental authority.