How Do They Get Away with It?
At The Washington Times, Charles Hurt writes:
"After all these years it took a great constitutional scholar who had spent a life cloistered in academia and street work to utterly rape our most cherished Constitution.
"This business of bypassing the Senate to pick 'recess' appointments to positions most Americans have never heard of may seem trivial. It is anything but. What Barack Obama has done has been to disembowel the U.S. Senate and shred the most carefully worded document in the history of civilized society."
Well, at least he left alone our less-cherished constitutions. But, in any case, it seems recess appointments slice open, draw-and-quarter, behead, flay, machine gun, torture, and castrate our most cherished constitution. (And Obama's doing all this, by the way, to implement his "socialist platform"! Such as pumping money to wealthy bankers.) They must be something that has never, ever been done before, right?
Well, in about five seconds of research (it is literally the second link Googling for "recess appointments" yields), I turned up:
"Presidents since George Washington have made recess appointments... According to the Congressional Research Service, President Bill Clinton made 139 recess appointments. President George W. Bush made 171 recess appointments, and as of December 8, 2011, President Barack Obama had made 28 recess appointments.
So, in other words, Obama is "utterly raping" our constitution by employing a routine tactic far less than his predecessors did. And here is what really, really worries Hurt:
"What is to stop Mr. Obama now — or any future president — from simply “recess appointing” thugs to the Supreme Court in order to uphold his socialist platform?"
A couple of more seconds of hard looking, and...
"Washington appointed South Carolina judge John Rutledge as Chief Justice of the United States during a congressional recess in 1795... New Jersey judge William J. Brennan was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956 through a recess appointment... Eisenhower made two other recess appointments, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Potter Stewart."
How can this clown have an outlet in a daily paper in our capital?
"After all these years it took a great constitutional scholar who had spent a life cloistered in academia and street work to utterly rape our most cherished Constitution.
"This business of bypassing the Senate to pick 'recess' appointments to positions most Americans have never heard of may seem trivial. It is anything but. What Barack Obama has done has been to disembowel the U.S. Senate and shred the most carefully worded document in the history of civilized society."
Well, at least he left alone our less-cherished constitutions. But, in any case, it seems recess appointments slice open, draw-and-quarter, behead, flay, machine gun, torture, and castrate our most cherished constitution. (And Obama's doing all this, by the way, to implement his "socialist platform"! Such as pumping money to wealthy bankers.) They must be something that has never, ever been done before, right?
Well, in about five seconds of research (it is literally the second link Googling for "recess appointments" yields), I turned up:
"Presidents since George Washington have made recess appointments... According to the Congressional Research Service, President Bill Clinton made 139 recess appointments. President George W. Bush made 171 recess appointments, and as of December 8, 2011, President Barack Obama had made 28 recess appointments.
So, in other words, Obama is "utterly raping" our constitution by employing a routine tactic far less than his predecessors did. And here is what really, really worries Hurt:
"What is to stop Mr. Obama now — or any future president — from simply “recess appointing” thugs to the Supreme Court in order to uphold his socialist platform?"
A couple of more seconds of hard looking, and...
"Washington appointed South Carolina judge John Rutledge as Chief Justice of the United States during a congressional recess in 1795... New Jersey judge William J. Brennan was appointed to the Supreme Court by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956 through a recess appointment... Eisenhower made two other recess appointments, Chief Justice Earl Warren and Potter Stewart."
How can this clown have an outlet in a daily paper in our capital?
I thought the issue was that they weren't really recessed.
ReplyDeleteHurt doesn't mention it, so apparently he's forgotten he needs to make some sort of case.
And, should he be a Republican, he should be put on notice that the rhetoric just make his party look bad- they don't have the guts to make an impeachment play or even try to be more constitutional than the Democrats in any material way.
August, I think the issue is that the Senate is pretending NOT to be in recess although it clearly is.
ReplyDeleteI guess if the Post won't have you, and the "inner city" papers won't put up with the nonsense, there's always the Times.
ReplyDelete