Federal Appeals Court Decision Would Have Invalidated Hundreds Of Recess Appointments From Reagan To
Federal Appeals Court Decision Would Have Invalidated Hundreds Of Recess Appointments From Reagan To Obama
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2013/02/federal-court-would-have-invalidated-hundreds-of-recess-appointments.php
Just how sweeping was a last month’s federal appeals court decision declaring three one-year-old Obama recess appointments unconstitutional?
The Congressional Research Service turned back the clock (PDF) to the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s first term and dug up all the recess appointments they could find in the ensuing 32 years. Hundreds of recess appointments — by Presidents Reagan, H.W. Bush, Clinton, W. Bush, and Obama — would have been unlawful exercises of the recess appointment power had the new appeals court decision been in effect at the time, the CRS found in a memo dated Monday and released by Democrats on the House Education and the Workforce Committee, who requested the research.
The decision in January by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Noel Canning v. NLRB was focused on the three recess appointments that President Obama made to the National Labor Relations Board in January 2012. The court held that none of the three board members was properly appointed, which voided the board’s decision in the case under review by the court. The ruling has thrown a year’s worth of NLRB decisions into question. It has also by extension cast doubt on the actions of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has been headed up by a recess appointee, Rob Cordray, whose appointment also did not satisfy the court’s standards.
But the scope of the appeal court decision was far broader than the particular circumstances of the NLRB appointments. The three-judge panel, each nominated by Republican presidents, re-examined the origins of the constitutional recess appointment power and concluded that the president has the power to make recess appointments only in one narrow circumstance: when the Senate is in recess between sessions of Congress and only if the vacancy arose during that recess.