Opinion ID: 1240566
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Legislative Role in Implementing Subject Legislation

Text: CAG argues that the Legislature, through its enactment of West Virginia Code § 29-22-18a, has put in place a mechanism by which it retains some control over the process of implementing the legislation under discussion. By virtue of its active role in choosing the slate of prospective Grant Committee members, CAG contends that the Legislature retains power to control, in either direct or indirect fashion, the actions of a majority of the Committee members. Notwithstanding the governor's actual appointment of the Committee members, CAG maintains that the constitutional impediments resulting from the statutory appointment process remain. To support its position, CAG relies primarily on authority that bans various state Legislatures from appointing legislative members to serve on executive agencies, boards, or commissions. See Greer v. State of Georgia, 233 Ga. 667, 212 S.E.2d 836 (1975) (declaring legislation unconstitutional that named certain legislators to governing body of World Congress Authority); Alexander v. State of Miss. ex rel. Allain, 441 So.2d 1329 (Miss.1983) (striking various statutes naming legislative members to executive offices including Board of Economic Development); State of N.C. ex rel. Wallace v. Bone, 304 N.C. 591, 286 S.E.2d 79 (1982) (striking legislation that authorized four legislators to serve on legislatively created Environmental Management Commission as violative of separation of powers); State ex rel. State Bldg. Commn. v. Bailey, 151 W.Va. 79, 150 S.E.2d 449 (1966) (finding separation of powers violation in legislation naming four legislative officers to State Building Commission); see also Metro. Wash. Airports Auth. v. Citizens for Abatement of Aircraft Noise, 501 U.S. 252, 111 S.Ct. 2298, 115 L.Ed.2d 236 (1991) (striking legislation permitting Congress to place its members on board of review having veto power over airport authority's decisions). While the law is clear that legislators themselves cannot hold positions on executive agencies, boards, or commissions, the law is less clear as to what role a state legislature can play in compiling a list of prospective appointees for an executive appointment. CAG relies heavily on the decision reached by the Kentucky Supreme Court in Legislative Research Commission ex rel. Prather v. Brown, 664 S.W.2d 907 (Ky.1984). Among the holdings in Brown was a ruling finding several statutes unconstitutional on separation of powers grounds that directed the governor to make appointments for executive positions from lists submitted by the Legislative Research Commission, a small group of office-holding legislators. The Kentucky Supreme Court concluded that [t]he General Assembly has attempted to do indirectly what it cannot do directly. Id. at 923-24. CAG contends that the Brown decision is apposite and that this Court should follow the result reached in that case. The Grant Committee rejects Brown as analogous authority, arguing that a separation of powers violation does not occur in the instant case based on the simple fact that the governor, despite a legislatively prepared slate of prospective appointees, retains and exercises the constitutional right of appointment. Focusing on the fact that the governor chooses from the names submitted to him by the house speaker and senate president and emphasizing that the governor has the implied right to reject each name on a submitted list and to continue to do so until a list of suitable names appears, the Grant Committee maintains that the statutory appointment process does not run afoul of the separation of powers provision. In its attempt to distinguish Brown from the case sub judice, the Grant Committee states that the Kentucky governor brought the lawsuit challenging the various statutes at issue in that case; notes that the decision was issued in a highly charged political climate, [19] and suggests that the precedential value of that decision has been called into doubt based on recent decisions issued by that same court. Citing Prater v. Commonwealth of Kentucky, 82 S.W.3d 898 (Ky. 2002), the Grant Committee contends that, under a legal scenario similar to Brown, the Kentucky Supreme Court concluded that the [l]egislature has not attempted to appoint administrative officers, nor has it completely denied the appointive function of the Executive. [20] Id. at 909. The Grant Committee's reliance on Prater, however, is not only misplaced but, upon careful reading, Prater clearly supports the position of CAG, rather than that of the Grant Committee. In contrast to the issues presented in Brown, Prater did not involve separation of powers violations flowing from legislative involvement in the executive appointment process. Instead, the issue in Prater was whether a statute establishing a prerelease probation program impermissibly conferred the executive power of parole upon the judiciary, thus violating the state's separation of powers provisions. 82 S.W.3d at 898. After rejecting the argument that the executive branch's `participation' in the trial court's prerelease probation decision in the form of eligibility determinations somehow served to eliminate the separation of powers issue being considered, the Kentucky appellate court referred, for analytical purposes, to its prior case law addressing the constitutionality of legislative involvement in the executive's appointment authority. Id. at 907. Distinguishing the situation presented in Brown where both direct and indirect legislative appointments were held unconstitutional, the court in Prater cited two decisions upholding gubernatorial appointment to administrative bodies from lists of persons submitted by third parties with an interest in the composition of those bodies. Id. at 908. Significantly, neither of those two cases, Kentucky Association of Realtors, Inc. v. Musselman [21] and Elrod v. Willis , [22] involved the troubling and more serious issue of legislative involvement in the appointment process. Both of those cases concerned entities other than the state legislature submitting lists of prospective board members. When the legislature confines itself to the permissible function of establishing the parameters of executive appointment without injecting itself directly in the process, as the court in Prater explained, there is no encroachment upon the exercise [of] the executive power of appointment. 82 S.W.3d at 909. Crystalizing that it is the legislative involvement in the appointment process which prevents a challenged statutory method of appointment from passing constitutional muster, the court in Prater observed: [T]here is a fundamental and critical difference between the statutes held constitutionally flawed in LRC v. Brown and the statutes proved as constitutionally valid in Elrod v. Willis .... The statutes in LRC v. Brown granted the General Assembly continuing power, either directly through its leadership or indirectly through the LRC (which we recognized was not an independent agency but an arm of the legislature), to require the Governor to appoint to specified commissions persons who were nominees of the legislature. This transgressed the mandate in Section 27 of our Kentucky Constitution that each department of government shall be confined to a separate body of magistracy, and in Section 28 that [n]o ... persons, being of one of those departments, shall exercise any power properly belonging to either of the others. But the statute presently in question, as in the Elrod ... case[], gives the General Assembly no voice in the selection of committee members; its reach extends solely to providing a method of selection with reasonable criteria to generate commission members qualified for the position through participation of an organization, the Kentucky Association of Realtors, which is independent of legislative control. 82 S.W.3d at 908 (quoting Musselman, 817 S.W.2d at 216-17) (emphasis supplied). In seeking to bolster its position, the Grant Committee erroneously attributes a statement to Prater that, in actuality, emanates from Elrod. See 203 S.W.2d 18. Elrod involved a statute authorizing the Kentucky governor's appointment of individuals to the Disabled Ex-Servicemen's Board from a list submitted by the American Legion. The reason the Kentucky Supreme Court was able to declare in Elrod that the legislature had not attempted to appoint administrative officers, nor has it completely denied the appointive function of the Executive can be found in the very next sentence of that opinion. 203 S.W.2d at 20. It has simply limited the Governor's selection to a list of men named by an organization which is not affected by the limitation of section 27 [separation of powers]. Id. Rather than abandoning its ruling in Brown concerning the unconstitutionality of legislatively prepared lists for executive appointments, [23] the Court in Prater was merely clarifying that a separation of powers violation is not implicated when the list preparation at issue is not performed by legislators. See 82 S.W.3d at 908. The West Virginia Legislature, [24] under authority of West Virginia Code § 29-22-18a(d)(3), played an active role in identifying which individuals should be appointed to the Grant Committee. Through its designation of these individuals for the governor's selection, the Legislature wrongly injected itself into the appointment processa function indisputably reserved to the executive branch of government. The danger of this type of an encroachment is the possibility that such action could conceivably result in the expansion of the legislative power beyond its constitutionally confined role. Washington Airports Auth., 501 U.S. at 277, 111 S.Ct. 2298. While we do not wish to ascribe any improper assertion of control by the Legislature over the actions of the Grant Committee, we would be skirting our obligation to uphold the constitution of this state if we failed to recognize that the appointment mechanism established by the subject legislation does indeed set in place a device by which the Legislature may assert post-enactment control over executive branch decisions. See Manchin, 167 W.Va. at 173, 279 S.E.2d at 633. In clear recognition of this Court's responsibility to enforce the constitutional constraints imposed upon the separate branches of government and in adherence to our longstanding practice of strictly construing the separation of powers provision, we hold that, due to the resulting encroachment on the executive power of appointment, the provisions of West Virginia Code § 29-22-18a(d)(3) that direct the presiding officers of each house of the Legislature to submit a list of prospective candidates to the Governor for the chief executive's selection of certain members of the West Virginia Economic Grant Committee are in violation of the separation of powers provision found in article five, section one of the West Virginia Constitution.