Yes, but that’s restricted to the US territory, correct? In territory under US control but not part of the US, there can be Article II courts established by the executive branch. One notable example was the trial of some East German hikackers who landed in the US Zone of Berlin, pre-unification. They were tried in an Article II Court.
It’s certainly not universal; the exceptions provided for military law and wartime emergencies are a big gray area. I believe in the case of Berlin, the US Zone was a military district at the time, with the Army authorized to create tribunals. Another, more odious example is the still-not-entirely-resolved situation regarding suspects held at Guantanamo Bay.
ETA: In any case, the decisions of military and administrative tribunals, including military criminal courts, are appealable to the Article III system.
A few points:
First, Congress cannot delegate its legislative authority. The very first words of Article I say that “ALL legislative powers” are held by Congress.
Second, the current doctrine is that Congress may delegate various powers to the Executive Branch, but only insofar as there is an “intelligible principle” for the Executive agencies to bound their discretion. So for example, Congress may certainly pass a law giving the State Department the authority to set a year-to-year caps on accepting refugees. But they may not pass a law that simply allows the DOJ to arrest and prosecute people for offenses that DOJ may judge prudent, but do not appear in law.
Third, I’m not aware of any limits on how detailed Congress may seek to be in writing laws, so long as the exercise of the legislative power does not exceed constitutional limits. So if Congress wanted to pass a law that specifically banned certain firearms, as opposed to leaving it to the ATF to determine what constitutes a machine gun, there would be nothing wrong with that. But Congress could obviously not interfere in the rulemaking by state executive agencies, because that is not within its power.
Fourth, off the top of my head the nearest I can think of to Congress exercising rulemaking, rather than legislating, authorities would be GAO’s views on certain fiscal law and contracting matters. By practice, the Executive Branch has been fairly deferential to GAO’s written opinions on things such as the use of appropriated funds and oversight on whether contracts were awarded in compliance with relevant statutes. For example, I don’t recall the details right offhand, but if GAO asserts that a member of the Executive Branch has violated the Antideficiency Act (in which an agency spends funds in a way that the law does not allow it to do, such as overspending the amount of budget approved by Congress), that’s generally taken as a very serious matter (even though nobody has ever been prosecuted for violating that law). In some respects this role of GAO could be considered a hybrid of rulemaking and quasi-judicial.
ETA: and GAO is a legislative branch agency, if that wasn’t clear from my post.
I recently posted about this elsewhere, so I hope not to bore anyone with repetition.
For non-US readers it is important to remember that the US government has three distinct and theoretically equal branches–the executive (President and all who report to that office), the legislative (Congress, which makes laws), and the judicial (judges who decide what comports with the laws and ultimately with the Constitution).
In recent years the theory of the “unitary executive” has begin to hold large sway in the US. It was proposed in the Federalist Papers #70 and its meaning is controversial, especially because it is not a part of the written US Constitution or its laws.
For the non-US readers, the Federalist Papers were a series of influential essays/articles published in the 1780s at the time when the US was putting together its written constitution.
Federalist 70 is the subject of great deal of controversy. Its advocacy of a “unitary executive” is easily read strictly to mean that one person (the president) heads the executive branch, and that executive power should not be wielded by any sort of committee.
In practice we see that cabinet secretaries often wield a great amount of power and occasionally use it in opposition to or at a tangent from the president’s policy goals, but as the secretaries serve at the president’s pleasure an independent course is always at risk of correction by firing or coerced resignation.
Federalist 70 and the “unitary executive” are relevant now because beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, Congress began to establish “independent agencies” such as the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). The EPA was in theory not answerable to the president. Congress also used its oversight powers to manage other agencies of government, which annoyed Presidents of the era.
Beginning with Ronald Reagan, US presidents asserted that there could be no such thing as an independent agency, or a regulatory body that reported to Congress. A “unitary executive” meant that any organization taking action on behalf of the government could not be part of the legislature, and was therefore wholly subject to the President and his or her priorities (except of course when in contradiction of the law, as enacted by Congress).
This has suited Presidents of both parties, as these “agencies” could be directed to serve the ends of the executive rather than the legislative branch.
In reality, the answer is that whoever has power, has the power. Independent agencies or agencies that fall under the control of the legislature were beyond the conception of the US founders. They fall into a grey area that most recently has been overwhelmingly occupied by the executive branch.