State Constitutional Law in 1942–43

Abstract

Delegation of Legislative Power: To the Federal Government. The rapidly growing practice of making state agencies which administer social security laws responsible for bringing them into and keeping them in conformity with the federal Social Security Act came under review by the Washington supreme court. Immediately following adoption of the Senior Citizens Grants Act as an initiative measure in November, 1940, the federal Social Security Board began withholding the matching funds on the ground that the flat exemption of specified items of an applicant's income and resources failed to comply with the requirements of the national act. After three and a half months, the state administrators yielded to the persuasion of the Social Security Board and issued rules which in effect nullified the federally objectionable features, and at the same time detailed how the items formerly exempted were to be considered. A divided court sustained both the rules and the law. The majority concluded that the Washington law was intended to be construed in harmony with the federal act, as that act is amended and interpreted by its administrators. Accordingly, they viewed and approved the delegation chiefly as one which authorized the local administrators to declare certain portions of the act inoperative if they found them in conflict with the federal law. The situation was declared to be one in which “the Legislature enacted a statute under which the executive determines some fact or status upon the existence of which the operation of the statute is to depend.” This theory, of course, makes the function more judicial than legislative, as was pointed out in the dissenting opinion. But the theory completely ignores the fact that, after suspending the proscribed sections, the state administrators wrote their own set of definitions and rules, which were then instituted as a budgetary system.