Page:ACLU v. NSA Opinion (August 17, 2006), US District Court, East-Michigan.djvu/35

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concurring).

In that case, he wrote that it had been conceded that no congressional authorization existed for the Presidential seizure. Indeed, Congress had several times covered the area with statutory enactments inconsistent with the seizure. He further wrote of the President's powers that:

The example of such unlimited executive power that must have most impressed the forefathers was the prerogative exercised by George III, and the description of its evils in the Declaration of Independence leads me to doubt that they were creating their new Executive in his image. Continental European examples were no more appealing. And if we seek instruction from our own times, we can match it only from the executive powers in those governments we disparagingly describe as totalitarian. I cannot accept the view that this clause is a grant in bulk of all conceivable executive power but regard it as an allocation to the presidential office of the generic powers thereafter stated. Id. at 641.

After analyzing the more recent experiences of Weimar, Germany, the French Republic, and Great Britain, he wrote that:

This contemporary foreign experience may be inconclusive as to the wisdom of lodging emergency powers somewhere in a modern government. But it suggests that emergency powers are consistent with free government only when their control is lodged elsewhere than in the Executive who exercises them. That is the safeguard that would be nullified by our adoption of the 'inherent powers' formula. Nothing in my experience convinces me that such risks are warranted by any real necessity, although such powers would, of course, be an executive convenience. Id. at 652.

Justice Jackson concluded that:

With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations. Youngstown, 343 U.S. at 655 (Jackson, J., concurring).

Accordingly, Jackson concurred, the President had acted unlawfully. [*36]