Imagine your amateur softball league has a bylaw that all umpires must be hired by the league commissioner. Before a big game, some emergency umps-for-hire pile out of a van and start officiating without the commissioner’s approval. You’re skeptical, but it’s pointless to object during the game — the league has a hard rule that umpires won’t respond if you challenge their credentials. They make some terrible calls, and after a tough loss, you protest the game to the league — both because of the bad calls and because they shouldn’t have been allowed to umpire in the first place. Then comes the surprise: The league answers that despite its policy that umps must ignore all arguments about their hiring, you should have objected during the game anyway. And because you didn’t object during the game, you’ve lost your chance to object after the game.

Sound ridiculous? It may be, but it’s basically what happened to Willie Carr in his ongoing saga with the Social Security Administration. The SSA denied Carr’s application for social security disability payments. To challenge that denial, Carr first had to make his case to one of the SSA’s own administrative law judges. But those judges all suffered from a serious constitutional defect: They weren’t appointed by the social security commissioner, which is the bare minimum the Constitution requires for “officers of the United States.”