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Home > Blog > All > recess appointments

recess appointments

  • March 23, 2012

    This Week on JudicialNominations.org

    Following the recent deal to hold votes on 14 nominees, the Senate confirmed three district court nominees Thursday: David Nuffer to the District of Utah, Ronnie Abrams to the Southern District of New York and Rudolph Contreras to the District of Columbia.
     
    Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) voted against Nuffer, in spite of his stated support for his home-state nominee, in continued retaliation against President Obama’s recess appointments of Richard Cordray and three others.
     
    After last week’s Republican boycott of the Senate Judiciary Committee executive business meeting, the committee appeared poised again to lack quorum for this week’s meeting. A number of hours after its scheduled start time, enough senators finally convened to hold over one circuit judge and two district judges. The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has declared one of these district seats a judicial emergency.
     
    More
    Tags:
    Federal judicial selection, Judicial Nominations, recess appointments, senate obstruction
  • February 24, 2012

    This Week on JudicialNominations.org

    Just before the Senate went into its Presidents Day recess, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced that the chamber would take up the confirmation vote for Margo Kitsy Brodie to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York when they returned this coming Monday. The Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved her confirmation in October. Monday will mark the 265th day since her nominations.
     
    Before leaving the floor, Reid lamented the Republican obstruction of judicial nominations. Reid assured the Senate that the coming work period would focus on judges and continued, “We will have the fight on the judges ourselves because they are recommendations we make to the President. But these are the President's nominations and he should have the right to have these people working in his administration.” There are currently 21 confirmations waiting for a floor vote, 16 of which received unanimous committee support.
     
    More
    Tags:
    Federal judicial selection, Judicial Nominations, recess appointments, senate obstruction
  • February 6, 2012

    Taking Recess Appointments to Court

    by Jeremy Leaming

    A gaggle of senators, typically given to grousing about so-called activist judges, is agitating for court intervention into the president’s recent recess appointments, which The Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen highlights for its hypocrisy.

    As Cohen notes, Sens. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) agreed to join other senators in filing a “friend of the court brief in support of the federal legal challenges to President Obama’s recess appointments of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and three selections to the National Labor Relations Board. On Friday the senators issued a letter about their intent to file the brief, which will argue that the appointments are unconstitutional.

    All of those senators, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, have at one time or another expressed outrage over judges who supposedly legislate from the bench. So Cohen finds “something deliciously hypocritical” of their call for a federal court to take action and nullify the president’s recess appointments.  

    Cohen has some advice on how Democrats should respond to the Republicans’ call for judicial action over the administration’s recess appointments, writing, “If I were a Democrat in the Senate, or a White House tribune, I would be responding to the GOP lawsuit letter by loudly doubling down on the concept of having judges determine political procedure. Republicans want the courts involved in recess appointments? Fine. Then they should embrace the notion that the federal courts ought to decide whether the filibuster is constitutional was well. After all, it has less explicit constitutional support than a recess appointment, does it not?”

    Since it is likely that the Republican senators do not actually want judges determining the constitutionality of recess appointments or wading into the Senate’s use of the filibuster, they might more seriously focus on reforming procedure. Indeed it was the Senate Republican’s stalling tactics on Cordray’s nomination and the selections to the NLRB that prompted the recess appointments.

    More
    Tags:
    Judicial Nominations, Separation of Powers and Federalism, Andrew Cohen, filibuster, recess appointments, Richard Cordray, Sen. Jeff Merkley, sen. Tom Udall, Senate, Senate obstructionism, The Register-Guard
  • February 2, 2012

    Stop Knocking the OLC Over Reasoned Analysis of Recess Appointments, ACS’s Fredrickson Says

    by Jeremy Leaming

    Fuming over the recess appointments President Obama made in January, Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley leveled threats against the Assistant Attorney General Virginia Seitz who authored a legal memorandum backing those appointments. Not only attacking her legal analysis, Grassley said Seitz (pictured) should never be confirmed again for any position.  

    In a piece for The Huffington Post, ACS President Caroline Fredrickson takes Grassley to task for his misguided attacks on Seitz, who he voted to confirm to lead of the Office of Legal Counsel, which is charged with providing legal advice to the president and all executive agencies.

    Fredrickson writes:

    Seitz’s memorandum is straightforward and relies on precedent and historical practice of past attorneys general. If it’s unconvincing to Grassley that’s only because it helped the president stand up to the ongoing obstruction orchestrated by Grassley’s party.

    Since coming into office, President Obama has faced an intensifying front of opposition to his judicial, and many of his executive branch selections. For example, the obstructionism has greatly hobbled our federal courts, where there are more than 80 vacancies and caseloads of courts throughout the nation continue to swell, leaving far too many Americans without access to an efficient judicial system.

    After more than a year of going without a chief, the president moved on naming Richard Cordray to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Faced with three vacancies on the five-member board of the National Labor Relations Board, and ongoing of obstruction of nominees to those seats, the president used recess appointments to keep the agency functioning.

    More
    Tags:
    Executive power, Assistant Attorney General Virginia A. Seitz, Caroline Fredrickson, Office of Legal Counsel, OLC, recess appointments, Richard Cordray, Sen. Charles Grassley, Sen. Mike Lee, The Des Moines Register
  • February 1, 2012

    With Recess Appointments, Obama Is Executing Duty to Enforce Laws, Professor Testifies

    by Nicole Flatow

    In recess appointing Richard Cordray to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three others to the National Labor Relations Board, President Obama has acted “sensibly and soundly to defend his own prerogatives,” UNC Chapel Hill constitutional law professor Michael Gerhardt said during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Wednesday.

    During a more than three-hour hearing that featured sharp questioning and a host of objections to President Obama’s actions by Sen. Mike Lee, Gerhardt explained the clear constitutionality of President Obama’s action, and praised the Office of Legal Counsel’s recent memorandum defending the legality of the action as a “perfectly good example” of the kind of nonpartisan legal analysis performed by the office.

    After dismissing arguments that President Obama did not act during an actual “recess” because the Senate held pro forma sessions every three days, Gerhardt went further to explain that Obama has an affirmative constitutional duty to enforce the laws faithfully, which he was aiming to effectuate in making recess appointments.

    “No doubt in this case the president considered that if he didn’t act there would be laws left unenforced --  laws that he’s obviously trying to do what he can to put into implementation,” Gerhardt said.

    Some of the other witnesses testified that the recess appointments have resulted in uncertainty for businesses, because decisions made by the NLRB and actions taken by the CFPB may be invalidated if legal challenges to Obama’s appointments are successful.

    But Gerhardt agreed with Rep. Danny Davis during questioning that all actions and major pieces of legislation are subject to legal challenge, and there is nothing unique about Obama’s recess appointments.

    “It’s sort of a false premise to say that recess appointments are likely to create litigation when the litigation is likely to take place in any event,” Davis said. “Whether these are recess appointees or any other kind of appointees, individuals still have the option to ask for judicial review.”

    Around the same time that this hearing was occurring, the Senate Banking Committee was also reviving the issue of Obama’s recess appointments during an oversight hearing involving Richard Cordray.

    As The National Law Journal’s Jenna Greene explains:

    More
    Tags:
    Executive power, Financial regulation, Labor law, Economic, Workplace and Environment Regulation, Judicial Nominations, Separation of Powers and Federalism, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, NLRB, recess appointments, Richard Cordray
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