Obama Blatantly Violates A Broken Constitutional Process

[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to . . . appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law . . .

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

U.S. Constitution, Art. II, Sec. II.

The other day, the President unilaterally appointed former Democratic Ohio attorney general Richard Cordray to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and, further, appointed three people to the NLRB. In doing so, Obama bypassed the Senate's right to provide "advice and consent" to the appointments, and Obama made the appointments while the Senate was still in session. Obama's actions are outrageous. As Constitutional experts John Yoo from the right and Richard Epstein from the left agree, Obama's action violate the plain language of the Constitution. As Roger Pilon sums this up at Cato:

So what is this? It’s politics — Chicago politics, plain and simple. If any doubt remained, three years into his presidency, that Obama is a master demagogue, with class warfare as his central tool, this incident should dispel it.

This highlights a systemic problem with the whole recess appointment / advise and consent process. One, the President's powers of recess appointment are an anachronism. When this clause was approved in 1787, Congressmen traveled about on horse and in buggies. Congressional recesses could last several months. Today, the reality is that recesses rarely last even a month, and in an emergency, Congress could be reconvened in a day. There is no justification for the recess appointment power today. Its only use is to get around the Constitutional requirement that the Senate consent to the Presidential appointment. That was never its intended purpose.

That said, if there are to be no more recess appointments, then it behooves the Senate to stop filibustering Presidential appointments and give them an up or down vote. The Senate's use of the filibuster to prevent an up or down vote is, in its own way, as much a violation the spirit of the duty to "advise and consent" as is the President's use of recess power to go around the Constitutional duty to receive Senate consent. The current system promotes only gridlock and excessive politicization. Changes to both the recess power and Senate treatment of nominees would lead to a much better and more democratic system.

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A Partisan Democrat's Solution To End Partisanship

He is Washington's Most Toxic Asset. He, along with Chris Dodd and Bill Clinton, were the architects of our current economic meltdown. He is the Banking Queen - Democrat Rep. Barney Frank, as thoroughly partisan as anyone to ever have sat in Congress. In response to soon to be former Sen. Evan Bayh's chastisement of Congress for rank partisanship, Frank agreed and proposed his own solution to that problem:

. . . Frank says his fellow Democrat could do more to change that by staying in Congress and helping change the filibuster rule than by stepping out of public service.

Hah. His answer to the partisan crisis is to make the minority party irrelevant, thus allowing the majority Democrats to ignore Congressional Republicans. It would end partisan rancor by dispensing with any need for bipartisanship. When in God's name will Mass. voters turn this walking disaster out of office?

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Pulling Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory

Obama campaigned to the center, he is governing from the far left. And it is clear that his major policies are not supported by the majority of Americans. As the election of Scott Brown to the Kennedy's ancestral seat punctuated, the public is delivering a backlash. What has the GOP done to further that backlash for the past year? Absolutely nothing. Which is precisely what they should have been doing. When your opponent is committing suicide, you stand out of the way. What you don't do is give them the number to the suicide hotline and hire them a publicist who will blame the suicide attempts on you.

But that is just what it seems our GOP is doing. The only way Obama will be able to salvage the 2010 and 2012 elections will be if he succeeds in painting himself as reasonable and the Republicans as obstructionists - or, if in an act of insanity, the Republicans become complicit in Obama passing his socialist agenda into law, either by joining in or refusing to filibuster. In this regard, meeting with Obama on the left's health care legislation and allowing "Pay As You Go" legislation to escape Congress without a filibuster are just mind numbingly stupid errors.

I recently blogged on why the GOP should reject Obama's offer to meet on the health care monstrosity and how they should make a counteroffer to meet on deficit reduction and spending excess. But it seems that the GOP is planning to attend, regardless. They are insane.

And now we have Obama signing Pay as You Go legislation into law today. Pay As You Go was passed on a party line vote a few days ago, along with an increase in the national debt ceiling. If any piece of legislation deserved to be filibustered, it was that piece of Orwellian dribble. I have blogged on this legislation here and here. Pay as You Go does nothing towards imposing fiscal responsibility, it provides a smoke screen for Democrats both to claim fiscal responsibility and to justify tax increases, and because of the accounting rules of the CBO, it makes it virtually impossible for future Congresses to enact tax cuts. So it was both a propaganda victory for the left, a way to deflect attention from another increase in the national debt ceiling, and a brake on conservatives. That is a big win for the left. Way to go GOP.

If the GOP doesn't have the backbone to explain to America why they are filibustering a piece of horrendous legislation, if they think not using the filibuster will protect them from the left demagouging the issue, they are utterly insane. Obama is on the defensive and the GOP is demurring because they think the public is too stupid to understand reality. These jokers will pull defeat from the jaws of victory between now and November, I am sure of it.

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