Obama Won’t Make Recess Appointments Today

[progressoid]

53. 3 day or 10 day recess - what difference does it make?

The president has an opportunity to fill critical positions that they have been blocking. Should we wait another year? Two?

They're playing hard ball and we're afraid to come out of the dugout.


Here:

A few commentators have suggested that this precedent only applies to what are known as “intersession” recesses — that is, the recess that occurs around the beginning of each new year when one session of Congress ends and another begins. Under this theory, President Obama blew his chance to make recess appointments when he allowed the second session of the 112th Congress to begin at noon today without making any appointments. This argument, however, has no basis in the Constitution itself. As Evans explains, “the text of the Constitution does not differentiate expressly between inter- and intrasession recesses for the Recess Appointments Clause,” and “the main purpose of the Recess Appointments Clause—to enable the President to fill vacancies to assure the proper functioning of our government —supports reading both intrasession recesses and intersession recesses as within the correct scope of the Clause.”

Recess appointments during very brief recesses are not common, but they are only uncommon because few if any senators have ever engaged in the kind of systematic and determined effort to prevent America from governing itself that began once Mitch McConnell took over as Senate Minority Leader. McConnell’s rampant obstructionism can be summed up in just one chart:



That chart represents the number of times a cloture motion — a motion seeking to break a Senate filibuster — was filed in every recent Congress. The massive spike at the end, where the number of cloture motions more than doubles, coincides with when McConnell took over as Minority Leader.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/01/03/396384/president-obama-reportedly-will-make-recess-appointments-today-or-tomorrow/