(yester) Today's Supreme Court Case You Haven't Heard About

[boutons_deux]

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that, while the rest of the country's political class remains fascinated by the Passion Of Big Chicken, the future of the entire Obama presidency today is hanging fire before the United States Supreme Court.

Only real SCOTUS wonks saw this one coming but, should the court decide in favor of the plaintiff in National Labor Relations Board v. Canning, there simply will not be much left for Barack Obama to do in office except greet NCAA championship teams and drone people to death in Waziristan.

At issue in the case is the president's power to make recess appointments to various executive branch positions.

Frustrated by the fact that he has an opposition party that is

a) dedicated to nullifying wholly the results of the 2008 and 2012 presidential election, and

b) insane,

the president resorted to recess appointments in order to staff his government, as other presidents have before him. Republicans in the legislature then argued that the recess appointments were cons utionally illegitimate because they were holding kabuki "sessions" of the legislature and that, therefore, there was no recess at all. Three of the appointments in question were to the National Labor Relations Board, which could not function with three positions empty, which was rather the obvious point of blocking them. The full NLRB then ruled against the canning division of the Noel Company in a contract dispute. The company challenged the ruling on the grounds that three of the commissioners held their office illegitimately. Spectacularly, but unsurprisingly, the company got the D.C. Court of Appeals to agree, and up to the nine wise souls the case went.

Bear in mind. The D.C. Court overruled over a century of settled practice within the government.

The opinion was written by Judge David Sentelle, whose long career as a political hack stretches back to the 1980s, when he helped confound the investigation into the Iran-Contra scandal. (Sentelle believes all financial regulation to be uncons utional, which must keep him in dinners, anyway.) In fact, to call Sentelle a hack is to insult most of the people who worked for Huey Long.

This is an attempt to create a legal exception through which this president will not be allowed to govern effectively.

If Sentelle's hackery is upheld, the ramifications are enormous.

Among the president's other recess appointments is Richard Cordray at the Consumer Finance Protection Board. If the ruling goes against the administration, and Cordray's appointment is declared illegitimate, then the CFPB may go down as well. Which is, of course, rather the point of the whole exercise. And you would not be remiss if you were to recall that this president is the only one in 50 years who has not been allowed to fill seats on the very court that launched this whole mess -- the D.C. Court of Appeals. Which is, of course, rather the point.

Supreme Court Case Obama Nominations - Today's Supreme Court Case You Haven't Heard About - Esquire

my guess: The "balls and strikes" Roberts Gang of Five will find for Canning, just like they ACTIVIST-LY went to bat for the 1%/VRWC/UCA, overturned a 100+ years of stare decisis, and said "Corporations are People, Too, My Friend"

btw, Sentelle is a Confederate redneck appointed by St Ronnie

[boutons_deux]

The Obama administration's brief to the Supreme Court notes that "since the 1860s, at least 14 presidents have, collectively, made at least 600 civilian appointments (and thousands of military ones) during intra-session recesses." As for appointments to vacancies that opened up before a recess, it argues that "there were indications from each of the first four presidents — including actual appointments by Washington, Jefferson and Madison — that recess appointments can indeed be used to fill vacancies that preexisted the recess."

Where language in the Cons ution about the operation of government is ambiguous, the court should defer to long-standing practices accepted by the executive and the legislative branches. The recess appointment is one of those practices.


http://www.latimes.com/opinion/edito...#ixzz2qUOm19GN


Recess appointments during the George W. Bush administration


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...administration