Clarence Thomas: "There’s very little major legislation that comes from the legislature. The legislation comes in the form of regulations from agencies. They tend to have all three powers. They have the executive power, the enforcement power, they have administrative judges to adjudicate, so they have all three. And the question for us is, where do they fit in the constitutional structure?

When a private right is somehow intruded upon by one of these agencies, what is the role of the federal courts? If we simply defer to the agencies, which is what we do now, in many cases, aren’t we doing precisely what happened when it came to the royal courts of the pre-Revolutionary era? How does that make us any different? You’ve got this creation that sits over here outside the Constitution, or beyond the Constitution. How does it fit within our constitutional structure? How’s it limited and what is the risk that it will actually vitiate the constitutional protections that we have?"

Michael Pack: "I think it was James Madison who said that if you combine the executive, legislative, and judicial in one person, or branch, it’s the very definition of tyranny."