11. Morrison, Alarmism, op. cit. cit., note 2, p. 1721. Morrison also sometimes refers to “norms” in the same way he uses “incentives” in his back and forth with Ackerman. See, for example, id., p. 1693 (referring to “standards that value independence and professional integrity and require the Office of the Legal Counsel to provide legal advice based on its best legal advice”). Congressional limited legal staff also limits what lawmakers can achieve. The Office of the Advocate General of the House has seven lawyers, including the General Counsel of the House, and the Office of the Legal Counsel of the Senate has six lawyers, including the Legal Counsel of the Senate. (While funding for the Office of the House General Counsel has increased significantly since the late 2000s, it declined between fiscal years 2010 and 2015 and did not exceed fiscal 2010 levels until fiscal year 2020.) In addition, the number of committee employees in both chambers has declined or remained almost the same over the past four decades. In the House of Representatives, the total number of committee staff has fallen by 30.20 per cent since 1977 and by 40.89 per cent since its peak in 1991. And in the Senate, committee staff has increased by only 1.38% since 1977.
The limited number of internal legal staff and committees can help Congress continue to seek outside legal advice. For example, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, recently requested an external legal analysis of a 2020 OLC memorandum on the Equal Rights Amendment, which she sent to President Biden to support his call for the repeal of the OLC declaration. Unlike the President and Vice-President, cabinet members are not elected; they are appointed on the proposal of the President and subsequent confirmation by the Senate. The rest of the executive branch consists of the various independent federal departments and agencies that assist the president in fulfilling the functions of the executive branch. Nevertheless, there is an incentive to combine this investment in a moderate reputation with a substantial ideological commitment (albeit somewhat toned down for moderation reasons) that has attracted them to their executive legal office and made them attractive candidates. Lawyers at the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) could systematically focus on affordable housing. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lawyers can be biased about homeland security measures.
In either case, this systematic bias may need to be continued in order to gain approval from their colleagues in these offices, even if it undermines the type of purely mid-level lawyer who could keep the relevant public service lawyer in all presidential administrations. This means that public service lawyers will change in response to their political superiors, but incompletely. The heads of executive departments are involved in the succession of the president in the event of a vacancy of the president after the vice president, the speaker of the House of Representatives and the president pro tempore of the Senate. At the other end of the continuum, we have “public service lawyers.” These lawyers are not politically appointed and do not get their positions for partisan political reasons. Faced with these selection effects, these lawyers are exposed to their own distinctive incentives. And the much rarer presence of these lawyers in OLC and WHC suggests that these offices will operate very differently from other executive law firms, which are dominated by public service lawyers. Although the Senate supported the creation of the joint office and included provisions in the government`s version of the ethics bill, the House of Representatives rejected the proposal. Lawmakers would have feared that a shared office would favor the interests of the Senate over those of the House of Representatives. The Congressional Research Service also wrote that House conference participants “perceive the House and Senate as slightly different legal concerns,” making a shared office unsuited to their respective needs. The Office of the Congressional Legal Counsel passed away as a result during the conference. Establishing congressional counterparts at the OLC as departments within the Office of the House Counsel General and the Office of the Senate Legal Counsel — or simply giving the House Counsel General and Senate Legal Counsel new powers to perform that function — would expand the existing legal support architecture, rather than building new structures. This option would also include the legal analysis necessary for both litigation and the issuance of advisory opinions in the same institution, and would create a clear home in both chambers to analyze the scope and constitutional basis of Congressional powers.
However, in the absence of substantial increases in staff, this addition may impose a heavy burden on both offices. In fact, many directors believe that one of the most valuable functions of the general counsel is to advise the board as well as the management team on business strategy matters. In contrast, CCs are responsible for managing the legal functions of their organizations and for complying with applicable laws and regulations. DHS, the company`s third-largest division, employs more than 250,000 people and provides an annual budget of $58 billion for more than 20 components, including U.S. intelligence, Transportation Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Customs and Border Protection. U.S.
Immigration and Customs, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Cybersecurity, and Infrastructure. Security. The Internal Security Act of 2002 created the Ministry in response to the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 and merged 22 law enforcement agencies. The OPC balances the legal aspects of the business while monitoring the impacts and risks associated with new stages of the business. My thesis is not that Ackerman or Morrison are right or wrong; Instead, I write to highlight the limitations of this focus on these two offices in order to understand the legal operations of the executive branch more generally.8 OLC and WHC are important and probably more important than any other single legal office in the executive branch.9 The problem with this focus on OLC and WHC, however, is that OLC and WHC are less representative and less important to executive legalism than almost exclusive attention. which is dedicated to the executive. to them suggests. Professors Daryl Levinson and Richard Pildes have argued that Madisonic notions of separation of powers are not transferable to our current constitutional system because political actors are more loyal to their party than to their branch of government.147 Levinson and Pildes, for example, argue that members of Congress do not so much protect the interests of Congress as the interests of the political party they represent in Congress. 148 This leads to problems, especially in periods.149 In times of divided government, branches constrain each other, not out of institutional loyalty, but out of partisan political interest.150 During unitary government, however, party interests lead to collusion between branches, undermining the separation of powers and “ambition that thwarts ambition.” 151 The labour market for political lawyers presents many of these dynamics.
To get to the point where you are considered, legal qualifications are not enough. The lawyer must have been willing to be at the dinner or fundraising circle in Washington regularly to establish politically connected contacts. The lawyer must be willing to reap the benefits and bear the costs of the polarizing seal of a political position in a presidential administration on his or her long-term resume. They must be prepared to have their name attacked and slandered in the media. And they must be willing to work long hours for low wages.