Tonight at 9pm ET, the President will deliver the State of the Union Address at the beginning of his run for re-election. Unlike Obama’s other addresses to joint sessions of Congress I wouldn’t expect this one to produce much in the way of a legislative blueprint. It’s an election year and most of the major [...]

The House Republican position on President Obama’s recess appointments is hard to even express without laughing. GOP Congressmembers are actually saying that they oppose the appointments because Congress is not in recess – and as soon as they finish their vacation and get back to Washington, they’ll have something to say about that. I’ve heard [...]

I think we have found the unifying thread on the President’s recess appointments yesterday. He did not decide to make appointments on key financial regulatory positions, like OCC or FDIC or the Federal Reserve, and some worry that those nominees will now get blocked from confirmation as a result, though they are seen as uncontroversial. [...]

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer put out his rationale for the recess appointment of Richard Cordray, including some of the legal reasoning. Here are the facts: The Constitution gives the President the authority to make temporary recess appointments to fill vacant positions when the Senate is in recess, a power all recent Presidents have [...]

As mentioned earlier, the President will make a recess appointment today for Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, opening up the bureau to regulate non-bank financial institutions and giving the new agency its first leader. This is a bold move by the President, and to put it in context, it’s important to [...]

When I saw President Obama miss his chance to use the “Roosevelt precedent” to appoint Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or make any recess appointment, I considered the matter closed. The other two options for Obama to recess-appoint would set new precedents for the Presidency, and I didn’t think he would [...]

During the recess, the President has a number of opportunities to make recess appointments. He could simply determine that the pro forma sessions being used to keep Congress active were insufficient to prevent recess appointments. He could use his Constitutional power to adjourn Congress. But both of those would fly in the face of recent [...]

The reason that it was so easy to pass the two-month stopgap today on the payroll tax and unemployment insurance and the doc fix is because the House and Senate set up pro forma sessions throughout their holiday break, which extends into late January. These are designed to deny the President the ability to carry [...]

The recess appointment fight nominally only concerns Richard Cordray, the nominee to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans want to block his confirmation because they stop the agency from gaining regulatory powers over non-bank financial institutions if they remain without a director. So they’re using the nomination fight as a proxy to force changes [...]

As is typical at the end of the year, Harry Reid attempted to clear out a backlog of uncontroversial Presidential appointments before the holiday break. But Mitch McConnell would not allow it. He wanted assurances, instead, that the President would not seek out any recess appointments during the break, and he objected to moving the [...]

The Obama Administration, expecting that we’re in an age where the normal rules of politics apply and not an age of nullification, nominated two labor officials for open slots on the National Labor Relations Board. That board will see previous recess appointments expire at the end of the year, leaving it without a quorum and [...]