Congress probably should have greater power over the Executive, particularly regarding warmaking power, but the Tea Party approach to reining in executive administrative authority is to go against the structure outlined in the Constitution:
The REINS Act has received much attention from both sides of the aisle. Tea Party activists are fully behind it, Speaker of the House John Boehner recently endorsed it, and several other conservative interests have expressed their support, lauding it as a needed tool to “rein in” government agencies which they see as aggressively expanding the scope of federal rulemaking in recent years.
...The second constitutional argument against the REINS Act is more structural, arguing that the Act would disturb the balance of powers among the federal branches. Particularly, the Supreme Court has held that a statute is suspect if it “involves an attempt by Congress to increase its own powers at the expense of the executive branch.” Morrison v Olson, 487 U.S. 654, 658 (1988). In making this determination, the Supreme Court has particularly considered traditional roles of the separate branches. In this case, there is a fairly simple case to be made that Congress is trying to increase its own powers at the expense of federal agencies; evidence for this is ample, including in the acronym of the bill itself.
...REINS Act supporters appear to be hiding the ball somewhat here, disguising the full effect of the bill to avoid the politically daunting task of openly amending virtually every major piece of legislation since the Great Depression.
...Congress absolutely has the power to delegate (and cease to delegate) enforcement powers to the executive branch, but once it has done so it cannot influence the decisions that are made; that much is made clear in Chadha.
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