Published
June 30, 2026
The Continental Congress did not assemble merely to protest unjust laws imposing taxes or restricting political participation. Rather, our Framers sought a clean break from the Crown's constant rewriting of the very structure of colonial government to suit its own ends.
In addition to their grievances against particular policies, the Framers averred that the British government had been "taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments." The colonists understood that when the government can alter its form at will—whether by blurring or erasing lines between branches, or by transferring enforcement power to unaccountable hands — liberty itself is at risk.
The Framers carried forward the Declaration’s principle of separating powers, enshrining it into the Constitution by carefully and permanently assigning governmental power — legislative, executive, judicial — to separate and co-equal branches. The Framers were determined not to rebuild the British system in which enforcement power could be reallocated to whomever the government found most expedient in the moment. And so their solution was not to scatter enforcement authority to the winds, but to concentrate it in a single executive, elected by and accountable to the people. Article II vests all executive power in the President: the power to investigate, prosecute, and decide when and how the government's legal authority would be brought to bear.
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Fighting Extra-Constitutional Bounty Hunters
But echoes of the problems the Framers identified persist today. For over a century, the False Claims Act's qui tam provisions have operated as a quiet but significant departure from our constitutional separation of powers. Under those provisions, private citizens with no injury of their own and no accountability to the public may file suit in the name of the United States, make demands of American businesses on the government's behalf, and collect a share of any recovery.
These plaintiffs are, as we’ve called them, a "posse of ad hoc deputies" operating entirely outside the constitutional structure. The Vesting Clause places all executive power in the President — but qui tam relators (as the self-appointed citizens are called) exercise that power without presidential supervision. The Appointments Clause requires that those who exercise "significant authority" on behalf of the United States be appointed through constitutional channels — but qui tam relators appoint themselves. And the Take Care Clause gives the President control over enforcement priorities — but a relator's priorities are set by the prospect of a financial windfall, not the will of the people.
The Litigation Center has pressed these arguments directly at all levels of the federal judiciary. We joined the fight early, filing an amicus brief decades ago in the first major Supreme Court case challenge to the qui tam provisions. And we have been on the leading edge of the current wave of challenges, filing briefsacrossthecountry to challenge this violation of the separation of powers. We even presented oral argument to a federal district court that subsequently struck down the qui tam provision of the False Claims Act, and we participated at oral argument again in the pending appeal.
The Broader Fight for Structural Accountability
Reining in qui tam abuses of enforcement power is but one front in our long-running effort to preserve the constitutional structure the Framers designed. That work takes many forms.
The Litigation Center has supported the development of the major questions doctrine, which holds that agencies cannot claim authority to resolve issues of vast economic or political significance without clear legislative authorization. The Framers entrusted that work to the people’s elected representatives, not to unaccountable bureaucrats. We’ve advanced that doctrine in the face of executive overreach across the scope of government, including the attempted cancellation of hundreds of billions in student debt and the reshaping of American broadband, to name just a few examples.
Carrying the Principle Forward
The greatest threat to liberty is rarely a single act of oppression. It is the slow, structural erosion of the rules that keep the levers of power accountable to the people.
This is why our Declaration was not a laundry list of isolated complaints. It was a unified indictment of a government that had broken faith with the people it was supposed to serve, through taxation without representation, the manipulation of courts and juries, the suppression of trade, the exclusion of colonists from the political process, and the systematic dismantling of the structures designed to keep power in check. Each grievance named a different abuse; together, they described a single failure: government unmoored from accountability.
For decades, the Litigation Center has joined the fight to ensure that failure is not repeated. From trial courts to the Supreme Court, we work to hold government power to its constitutional limits: defending the right to be governed only by elected leaders, to have disputes resolved by impartial courts and juries, to participate fully in the political process, and to live under laws made and enforced through the constitutional process.
The Framers made their case in 1776. The Litigation Center makes it still.
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About the authors
Daryl Joseffer
Daryl Joseffer is president at the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center, the litigation arm of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. A former principal deputy solicitor general, Joseffer has argued 12 cases in the U.S. Supreme Court and briefed many more. He has argued dozens of appeals in other courts across the country.
