ABSTRACT
Representative Elliott H. Levitas, the indefatigable champion of the legislative veto, has termed the court's holding a "train wreck of government" that "opens the way for a true tyranny of the bureaucracy". Instead of promoting congressional control over the actions of bureaucrats, i.e., control by elected officeholders, legislative veto politics has more often devolved to the politics of special interest protection, typically operating in the secrecy of subcommittee anterooms, heavily influenced by unelected congressional staff. When Congress chose to apply the legislative veto as a way to control regulation and the federal bureaucracy throughout the 1970s and 1980s, it put in peril a device that had seemed useful as a means of accommodation on issues of national moment between the president and the Congress. The analysis of actual use of the legislative veto power over the regulatory process shows, however, that its loss is far from the catastrophe now bemoaned by so many commentators.
