Replication Data for: A Critical Assessment of the Originalist Case Against Administrative Regulatory Power

The documents here are a PDF Data Guide plus 17 Excel Files (numbered 1 to 17) containing the actual data and calculations. The PDF Data Guide is a PDF of the Article with the text of each calculation-based assertion highlighted in yellow. For each piece of highlighted text, there is an appurtenant comment, which gives a reference to a numbered Excel File and to one or more cells (or columns or rows) within that Excel File that provide the support for the assertion. (Note that sometimes a sheet within the specified Excel File is also referenced.) Abstract: The Supreme Court is poised to toughen the nondelegation doctrine to strike down acts of Congress that give broad discretion to administrators, signaling a potential revolution in the separation of powers. A majority of the Justices have suggested in recent opinions that they are open to the far-reaching theory that all agency rulemaking is unconstitutional insofar as it coerces private parties and is not about foreign affairs. If adopted, this theory would invalidate most of the federal regulatory state. Jurists and scholars critical of rulemaking’s constitutionality base their claims on the original meaning of the Constitution. But these critics face a serious obstacle: early Congresses enacted several broad delegations of administrative rulemaking authority. The critics’ main response has been that these early statutes do not count, because they fall into two areas in which (say the critics) the original nondelegation doctrine did not apply, or applied only weakly: noncoercive legislation (e.g., giving benefits) or foreign-affairs legislation. This Article finds that the originalist critics of rulemaking are mistaken to say that no early congressional grant of rulemaking power was coercive and domestic. There is a major counterexample missed by the literature on nondelegation, indeed by all of legal scholarship, and not discussed more than briefly even by historians: the rulemaking power under the “direct tax” of 1798. In that legislation, Congress apportioned a federal tax quota to the people of each state, to be paid predominantly by owners of real estate in proportion to their properties’ respective values. Thousands of federal assessors assigned taxable values to literally every house and farm in every state of the Union, deciding what each was “worth in money”—a standard that the legislation did not define. Because assessors in different parts of a state could differ greatly in how they did valuation, Congress established within each state a federal board of tax commissioners with the power to divide the state into districts and to raise or lower the assessors’ valuations of all real estate in any district by any proportion “as shall appear to be just and equitable”—a phrase undefined in the statute and not a term of art. The federal boards’ power to revise valuations en masse in each intrastate tax district is identical to the fact pattern in the leading Supreme Court precedent defining rulemaking. Thus, each federal board in 1798 controlled, by rule, the distribution of the federal real-estate tax burden within the state it covered.本数据集包含一份PDF格式数据指南，以及17个编号为1至17的Excel文件，其中收录了实际数据与计算过程。这份PDF数据指南为对应学术论文的PDF副本，其中每一项基于计算的论证文本均以黄色高亮标注。每一处高亮文本均附带一则配套注释，指明对应的编号Excel文件，以及该文件中可为该论证提供支撑的一个或多个单元格（或列、行）。（注：有时还会指定Excel文件内的具体工作表。） 摘要：美国最高法院正准备强化禁止授权原则（nondelegation doctrine），以推翻那些赋予行政官员广泛自由裁量权的国会法案，这预示着分权原则可能迎来一场变革。多数大法官在近期的判决意见中表明，他们倾向于接受一项影响深远的理论：所有行政机关的规则制定行为，若其对私人主体构成强制且不涉及外交事务，则均属违宪。若该理论得以采纳，绝大多数联邦监管体制都将被宣告无效。质疑行政规则制定合宪性的法学家与学者，其主张均以宪法原旨主义为依据。但这些批评者面临一个严峻障碍：早期国会曾颁布多部法案，广泛授予行政机关规则制定权限。批评者的主要回应是，这些早期法案不应被纳入考量范畴，因为它们属于两类（批评者认为）原始禁止授权原则不适用或仅微弱适用的领域：非强制性立法（如福利授予类法案）或外交事务立法。 本文认为，原旨主义批评者声称早期国会从未授予过具有强制性且属于国内事务的规则制定权限，这一观点存在错误。学界关于禁止授权原则的研究，乃至所有法学研究，都忽略了一个重要的反例——即便历史学家对此也仅作过简要提及：1798年《直接税法》项下的规则制定权。在该法案中，国会为每个州的民众分配了联邦税收配额，税收主要由不动产所有者按照各自财产价值的比例缴纳。数千名联邦评估员为美国各州的每一处住宅与农场核定应税价值，判定每项财产的“货币价值”——但法案并未对这一标准作出定义。由于同一州内不同区域的评估员在估值方式上可能存在巨大差异，国会在每个州设立了联邦税务委员会，有权将州划分为多个税务区，并可按照“看起来公正且公平”的比例，上调或下调任一税务区内所有不动产的评估价值——该短语在法案中未作定义，也不属于法律专业术语。联邦税务委员会在各州税务区内批量调整估值的权限，与最高法院界定行政规则制定的标志性判例中的事实模式完全一致。因此，1798年的各联邦委员会均通过制定规则，管控了其所辖州内联邦不动产税负担的分配。