President
Obama has left the golf courses of Hawaii. Our little wannabe despot is back and he's on a warpath. His target? America.
President Barack Obama bypassed the U.S. Senate and summarily installed Richard Cordray, the former Ohio attorney general, as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau yesterday.
Hours later, Obama filled three vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board, possibly the only agency Republicans dislike more than the consumer bureau.
The White House called these “recess appointments,” even though Congress technically wasn’t in recess. In doing so, the president is playing with fire. He risks an election-year legal challenge that could hamstring the consumer bureau and several other financial regulators whose pending confirmations will probably now stall. The president’s authority -- and that of future executives -- to fill administration posts without Senate approval may be limited by the courts. We think Obama risks too much to make what is largely a political point -- that he, more than the Republican Party, stands by American workers and consumers.
Source: Bloomberg
And here's the rub:
The Constitution clearly gives the president the power to make appointments when the Senate is in recess. The issue, then, is what makes a recess a recess? The Congressional Research Service in December said decades of congressional practice and Justice Department opinions have backed the position that the Senate should be out of session for more than three days before the president can make a recess appointment.
Lawmakers have resorted to holding so-called pro forma sessions every third day while Congress is out of town to block undesired appointments. Like much of what happens in Washington, the sessions are make-believe events in which the Senate is gaveled into business but conducts no real work. Senate Democrats during the second term of President George W. Bush were especially adept with this stratagem.
White House lawyers have concluded that the pro forma sessions don’t prevent Obama from making appointments. We think the president, who is making confrontation with congressional Republicans a major theme of his re-election effort, is choosing politics over principle, and playing dangerously with the Constitution’s checks and balances, in choosing to tell the Senate when it is and is not in session.
Source: Bloomberg
And here's how Obama stands to benefit by creating a political atmosphere that is even more divided and hostile than the one he has cultivated for three years:
The appointment, moreover, will surely heighten the clash between Obama and Congress over a full-year extension of the payroll-tax cut for workers and unemployment insurance for the jobless, endangering the recovery. The president also needs Congress’s cooperation on pending Federal Reserve Board and other bank-regulator nominations.
Source: Bloomberg
