Yesterday the Supreme Court ruled in the case of National Labor Relations Board v. SW General that an “acting” officer cannot simultaneously stand as a nominee to hold that office permanently, regardless of how the acting officer was appointed. The ruling is a double victory, both for the separation of powers between the president and Senate and for textualism.
Though technical, the statutory interpretation issue in this case was not overly complicated. The Federal Vacancies Reform Act (FVRA) lays out three methods by which someone can become an acting officer in three separate clauses, subsections (a)(1), (a)(2), and (a)(3). It also has a “disqualifying clause,” declaring that (with some exceptions not relevant here) “a person may not serve as an acting officer” if he has also been nominated for a permanent position as that same officer.
There would be no dispute that the disqualifying clause applies to all acting officers, except for one wrinkle: the disqualifying clause begins with the preamble “Notwithstanding subsection (a)(1).” Based only on this preamble, the government argued that the disqualifying clause applies only to those who became acting officers under subsection (a)(1). This would mean that anyone who became an acting officer under subsections (a)(2) or (a)(3) (including the man at the center of this case, former NLRB acting general counsel Lafe Solomon) could never be disqualified by the clause.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/how-strawberries-clash-helped-save-separation-powers
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