Obama: Did his appointments violate the Constitution?

The President's recess appointments to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board have raised the ire of Republicans, who say the Senate was not really in recess.

Every president swears an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, said the Washington Examiner in an editorial, but President Obama “is thumbing his nose at it.” When the Senate is in recess, the Constitution lets the president fill vital jobs by so-called “recess appointments,” bypassing Senate consent. Obama used that power last week to name Richard Cordray head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as well as to fill three seats at the National Labor Relations Board. The only problem, said Edwin Meese and Todd Gaziano in The Washington Post, is that the Senate was in session. Using a parliamentary procedure devised by Democrats to block the last President Bush’s recess appointments, Republicans have been holding minute-long “pro forma” Senate sessions every four days to keep the Senate, technically, in business. Obama unilaterally decided that the Senate was in recess anyway. So in what House Speaker John Boehner rightly called “an extraordinary and unprecedented power grab,” the president simply went ahead and made his appointments—a “tyrannical usurpation of power” that will surely be challenged in court.

Republicans are the ones defying the Constitution, said Ezra Klein in WashingtonPost.com. Most of them have admitted that Cordray, Ohio’s former attorney general, is well qualified to run the new consumer agency. Their only goal in using filibusters to block his nomination, and those of the NLRB nominees, was to keep those agencies from functioning as intended by law—to crack down on banks that cheat consumers and on employers who abuse workers. As Obama put it last week, “When Congress refuses to act—in a way that hurts our economy and puts people at risk—I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them.” Obama’s on firm legal ground here, said Harvard University constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe in The New York Times. Senate Republicans are distorting their “advice and consent” role by refusing to vote on presidential appointments, so as to paralyze entire agencies. If these appointments are challenged in court, the case “ought to be a slam dunk” for the White House.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Explore More
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us