The Obama administration continues to use the Constitution for toilet paper. If they get away with this, they’ll regret it when someone else comes to power. And the media, of course, lies for them and calls it a “recess appointment.”
[Thursday morning update]
Barack Obama’s tyrannical abuse of power.
[Bumped]
[Late-morning update]
The Constitution is clear on recess appointments. This isn’t one.
[Update a couple minutes later]
The appointment is Constitutionally dubious, and so is the job itself.
[Update early afternoon]
More thoughts from John Yoo:
President Obama is making a far more sweeping claim. Here, as I understand it, the Senate is not officially in adjournment (they have held “pro forma” meetings, where little to no business occurs, to prevent Obama from making exactly such appointments). So there is no question whether the adjournment has become a constitutional “recess.” Rather, Obama is claiming the right to decide whether a session of Congress is in fact a “real” one based, I suppose, on whether he sees any business going on.
This, in my view, is not up to the president, but the Senate. It is up to the Senate to decide when it is in session or not, and whether it feels like conducting any real business or just having senators sitting around on the floor reading the papers. The president cannot decide the legitimacy of the activities of the Senate any more than he could for the other branches, and vice versa.
Is the president going to have the authority to decide if the Supreme Court has deliberated too little on a case? Does Congress have the right to decide whether the president has really thought hard enough about granting a pardon? Under Obama’s approach, he could make a recess appointment anytime he is watching C-SPAN and feels that the senators are not working as hard as he did in the Senate (a fairly low bar).
I think this will come back to bite him. And it’s all about his reelection.