Do you remember that day in high school or college when you learned about the separation of powers? Today the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued a decision that contains some language which might leave you wondering whether, during the intervening years, somebody went and amended the Constitution.
The case is Massachusetts Teachers’ Retirement System v. Contributory Retirement Appeal Board and it is important for several reasons. This post deals with just one of those reasons, one that matters to anyone who might be affected by how much leeway a government agency has when it interprets a statute.
First some background. In 2005 the Legislature passed a law allowing vocational education teachers to increase their pensions by having up to three years of non-teaching employment count toward their “creditable service.” During that three-year period they must have been working in the same trade they ended up teaching, e.g. a plumber who becomes a vocational plumbing teacher can ask the retirement board to count three years of her pre-teaching plumbing when calculating her pension.
To qualify for this significant pension boost, teachers have to contribute “makeup payments” into the retirement system, in an amount equal to ten per cent of their regular annual compensation. They also have to pay “buyback interest.” But when should the interest accrue: when they entered the retirement system, or the start of the three-year period?
In answering that question, two agencies had competing interpretations of the statute. One agency, the Contributory Retirement Appeals Board (CRAB) said that the statute was clear and unambiguous. Interest should run from when the teacher joined the system. The other agency, the Massachusetts Teachers’ Retirement System (MTRS) disagreed, saying that the statute was silent on the issue. The Supreme Judicial Court heard the same silence, and held that the way the MTRS filled the silence was reasonable and entitled to deference.
One topic for a future post is the question of how silent the statute really is. In the meantime, I would like to address a more basic, constitutional aspect of the case.
What the Court said in explaining its decision is worth noting, not only if issues like democratic accountability rank high on your list of priorities, but also if you think that at some point your life may be affected by how an executive agency interprets a piece of legislation.
By way of a prelude to the Court’s explanation, let me refresh your memory of that high school or college lesson. The Constitution of the United States embodies the doctrine of the separation of powers, allocating the executive, legislative, and judicial roles to three distinct branches. The Massachusetts Constitution, which predates it, is more explicit. Article 30 states:
“In the government of this commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them: the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them: the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them: to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men.”
Because the Constitution prohibits the Legislature from delegating is lawmaking powers to the executive, courts and commentators refer to the “doctrine of non-delegation.” Of course, Massachusetts judges have long recognized that modern government requires some degree of delegation, but they have distinguished between situations where agencies are just “working out the details” of a policy that the Legislature has announced (which is permissible) and those where the agency is making “fundamental policy” (which is not).
If the Legislature has delegated to an agency the task of making “fundamental policy decisions” it has violated Article 30. That was a point the Court made very clear in 2006 when it decided Commonwealth v. Clemmey. But in today’s decision, which did not mention the non-delegation doctrine, the Court said this:
“[T]he Legislature simply chose to be silent on the issue, thereby leaving a policy gap to be filled by agency action.”
So this is a policy question, without doubt, not merely a matter of “working out the details.” Is the question of when interest accrues on a vocational teacher’s buyback a “fundamental policy question” or is it something less than that, e.g. a trifling or minor policy question? This recent report on the commonwealth’s unfunded pensions liabilities may influence how you answer that question. It mentions a figure of $23.6 billion.
One important lesson from today’s decision is this: It has become even easier for the Legislature to delegate policy questions to executive agencies, when even an issue that involves a multi-billion dollar unfunded mandate does not qualify as a “fundamental policy decision” of the sort that the Legislature has no constitutional right to delegate. If you have any questions or comments about the decision, I welcome your posts.
Peter Vickery, Esq., 