Just breaking. Via AP:
President Obama violated the Constitution when he bypassed the Senate to fill vacancies on a labor relations panel, a federal appeals court panel ruled Friday.A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that Obama did not have the power to make three recess appointments last year to the National Labor Relations Board.The unanimous decision is an embarrassing setback for the president, who made the appointments after Senate Republicans spent months blocking his choices for an agency they contended was biased in favor of unions.
Update — I was hoping to have some time to go over the decision, but I don’t. So here’s some commentary by John Elwood at Volokh Conspiracy:
This is a very important and very broad holding–indeed, much broader than when it appeared that this case would be resolved on the President’s ability to make recess appointments when the Senate was conducting “pro forma” sessions. The main thrust of the court’s opinion is that the recess appointment power extends only to intersession recesses–recesses between sessions of Congress–and not to intrasession recesses. Intrasession recess appointments have been made fairly commonly since WWII, and have been particularly common since the Reagan Administration. UN Ambassador John Bolton and Judge William H. Pryor, Jr. are two of the more high-profile intrasession recess appointments in recent years. The D.C. Circuit’s holding is is in acknowledged conflict with an Eleventh Circuit opinion from 2004. Intrasession appointments may be even more common than intersession appointments, so this is an important ruling as a practical matter. But the court also held (or at least stated) that the recess appointment power may only be used to fill vacancies that arise during the recess of the Senate.
This decision has the potential to become the new Citizens United to the left, a court decision over which they foam at the mouth and say all sorts of insane things.
Canning v. NLRB – D.C. Ct. of Appeals Decision 1-25-2013
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