What I'm Reading...or Hearing

I just finished listening to the audio CD version of Richard Labunski's new book, James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights (Oxford Univ. Press 2006).  Very enjoyable! (I'm a big fan/consumer of audio nonfiction, especially related to law or economics; I listen to the books as I commute to and from my school). 

One thing that struck me from this narrative was the fact that the President's power to remove agency directors and similar officials kept coming up as a point of contention in the ratification debates.  This is a topic we always cover in my Admin Law course, as most casebooks include a short section on it.  Even so, we never consider material earlier than Humphrey's Executor, so in my mind I had come to associate the controversy over this issue with the New Deal explosion in administrative agencies, that is, contemporaneous with the golden era of the nondelegation doctrine, etc.  The nondelegation doctrine is one of my areas of research interest, and the anti-delegation literature (along with some Admin casebooks) might give the impression that the administrative state is essentially a twentieth-century innovation, apart from the old ICC.  So it surprised me to hear such strong hints that the Framers themselves contemplated a panoply of agencies and administrators - enough that they would argue repeatedly about whether the Constitution gave the President too much control over them.

                                                                                                                   -Dru Stevenson