Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/19-1434_ancf.pdf
Page Number: 17

Cite as:  594 U. S. ____ (2021) 

13 

Opinion of the Court 

the duties of APJs “partake of a Judiciary quality as well as
Executive,”  APJs  are  still  exercising  executive  power  and 
must remain “dependent upon the President.”  1 Annals of 
Cong., at 611–612 (J. Madison); see Oil States, 584 U. S., at 
___ (slip op., at 8).  The activities of executive officers may 
“take ‘legislative’ and ‘judicial’ forms, but they are exercises 
of—indeed, under our constitutional structure they must be 
exercises  of—the  ‘executive  Power,’ ”  for  which  the  Presi-
dent is ultimately responsible.  Arlington v. FCC, 569 U. S. 
290, 305, n. 4 (2013) (quoting Art. II, §1, cl. 1).

Given the insulation of PTAB decisions from any execu-
tive  review,  the  President  can  neither  oversee  the  PTAB 
himself nor “attribute the Board’s failings to those whom he 
can oversee.”  Free Enterprise Fund, 561 U. S., at 496.  APJs 
accordingly exercise power that conflicts with the design of 
the Appointments Clause “to preserve political accountabil-
ity.”  Edmond, 520 U. S., at 663. 

The  principal  dissent  dutifully  undertakes  to  apply  the
governing test from Edmond, see post, at 5–10 (opinion of 
THOMAS, J.), but its heart is plainly not in it.  For example, 
the dissent rejects any distinction between “inferior-officer
power”  and  “principal-officer  power,”  post,  at  12,  but  Ed-
mond calls for exactly that: an appraisal of how much power 
an officer exercises free from control by a superior.  The dis-
sent pigeonholes this consideration as the sole province of
the Vesting Clause, post, at 14–15, but Edmond recognized
the Appointments Clause as a “significant structural safe-
guard[ ]” that “preserve[s] political accountability” through 
direction and supervision of subordinates—in other words,
through a chain of command.  520 U. S., at 659, 663.  The 
dissent would have the Court focus on the location of an of-
ficer in the agency “organizational chart,” post, at 1, but as 
we explained in Edmond, “[i]t is not enough that other of-
ficers  may  be  identified  who  formally  maintain  a  higher 
rank,  or  possess  responsibilities  of  a  greater  magnitude,” 
520 U. S., at 662–663.  The dissent stresses that “at least