This piece originally appeared at Prototyping Politics.
In a previous post, I explained how I had come to rethink the 1983 Chadha decision. I used to believe it was the original sin in the architecture of national emergency law, striking down Congress's preferred mechanism for checking executive power. But after five years working on emergency powers reform—testifying before Congress, consulting with offices across both chambers, and building coalitions around the ARTICLE ONE and REPUBLIC Acts—I now see the failure differently. The problem wasn't that the Supreme Court ended the legislative veto. It was that Congress had failed to use it effectively before the Court ruled.
And here’s the surprising part: the legislative veto never really disappeared. Yes, Chadha struck it down. Presidents began issuing signing statements objecting to it. But Congress kept writing versions of it into law. And in practice, the most important of these—the so-called “committee vetoes”—still work.
One major factor in changing my thinking was a book by University of Colorado at Denver Professor of Political Science Michael Berry. His work builds on the foundational insights of Louis Fisher, whose scholarship has long documented how Congress adapted after Chadha. In his 1993 article, "The Legislative Veto: Invalidated, It Survives," Fisher showed how practices like report-and-wait provisions and coded language such as "notification" allowed Congress to continue exercising control even without formal statutory vetoes. Everyone working in this space is building on Fisher's analysis.
