Iowa Supreme Court Justice David May discussed the concept of separation of powers, federalism and other constitutional topics in an interview on the Iowa Judicial Branch’s “In the Balance” podcast posted Sept. 8 on the Judicial Branch website.
In the interview, Justice May talks about his path to the Iowa Supreme Court beginning 30 years ago when came to Iowa to attend Drake Law School followed by his years in private practice, as a judge on the Iowa district court, and as an appellate judge on the Iowa Court of Appeals before being appointed to Iowa Supreme Court in 2022.
May defined separation of powers as the division of powers of a government into the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, “plus the idea that people who exercise powers of one branch shouldn’t be exercising the powers of another branch.”
“The Legislative power is about making laws; the executive power is the power to give effect to and enforce laws,” he said. “The judicial power is our authority to hear and decide cases and make binding judgments in them. And as part of that is the power to construe and apply the law as we resolve legal cases and controversies.”
Although the words “separation of powers” are nowhere in the U.S. Constitution, Justice May said the concept is “undisputedly part of the structure” of the Constitution. “In Article I, all legislative power is vested in the Congress; in Article II, executive power is vested in the president; in Article III, judicial power is vested in the Supreme Court as well as any inferior courts that Congress might choose to make.”
Separation of powers applies to Iowa’s State government, as well, he said. The Iowa Constitution breaks the state government into three branches: legislative authority is vested in the General Assembly in Article III; executive authority is vested in the governor in Article IV; judicial power is vested in Article V in the supreme court, the district court, and inferior courts the General Assembly may create.
“This structure is quite similar to the United States Constitution,” he said, and just as separation of powers are quite clear in the Iowa Constitution, “our Constitution takes this notion a step further by making the separation of powers explicit. Article III, Section 1 says that the powers of government shall be divided into the legislative and the executive and the judicial. And, then again, it says that no person charged with exercising the powers belonging to one shall exercise powers of another unless it’s expressly directed or permitted in the Constitution.”
In response to the question of whether there are disadvantages of separation of powers, Justice May said the system is inefficient. The alternative, he said, is where a single individual holds all the powers of the government and can just make up the law, enforce the law, and interpret the law as they like.
“This would be highly efficient, one might say, sort of in the ‘make the trains run on time’ sense, but the cost of this efficiency, and just to be crystal clear, the insurmountable objection to this kind of approach, is that this sort of concentration of power would present an unacceptable threat to liberty, and it’s something we squarely reject here in the United States and in Iowa particularly.”
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