WhatFinger


That horrible separation-of-powers thing foils our hero yet again.

Supremes unanimously throw out Obama's recess appointments



Barack Obama certainly operates as if constitutional limits to presidential power don't apply to him. But the Supreme Court - even its four liberal justices - have other ideas. Today, the Court handed down a 9-0 decision tossing out the so-called "recess appointments" Obama tried to sneak past the Senate when the Senate was not actually in recess.
Nice try, champ.
The case arose from a political dispute between President Obama and Senate Republicans, who claimed he had no authority to put three people on the National Labor Relations Board in January 2012 when the Senate was out of town. He used a president's power, granted by the Constitution, to "fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate." But the Republicans said the Senate was not in recess at the time the appointments were made, because every three days a senator went into the chamber, gaveled it to order, and then immediately called a recess.

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By a unanimous vote, the Supreme Court agreed that the Senate was not in recess, holding that it's up to both houses of Congress to define when they're in session or in recess. As a result of the decision, the Senate can frustrate a president's ability to make recess appointments simply by holding periodic pro forma sessions, a tactic used in recent years by both political parties. The question, the court said, is whether the Senate had the capacity to act. It found that during the recess at issue, the court did have that power.
There is no question that the Senate was using a procedural trick to remain technically in session while most of its members were out of town. But you know who devised that trick? Harry Reid, that's who. And he did it when George W. Bush was president for the express purpose of preventing Bush from making recess appointments. Bush didn't like it, but he recognized that Reid's tactic did legally qualify as putting the Senate in session, and he wasn't about to disrespect the Constitution even to get around a cretin like Harry Reid. No such respect for constitutional separation of powers was going to come from Barack Obama, who has often been heard to bemoan what a bummer it is that the Constitution prevents him from just doing whatever he wants. By the way, if it surprises you that the liberal justices would take this position, remember that the judiciary is a co-equal branch of government too. They may sympathize with Obama politically and they may have even thought he made good appointments, but bend over for an abuse of power this obvious would have had the effect of neutering the Court's own power and authority. That wouldn't be good for them, and it wouldn't be good for the country. So at least in this instance, good on them for knowing where to draw the line.


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Dan Calabrese -- Bio and Archives

Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain

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