President Obama prides himself on having taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. So he must be smarting from this week’s Supreme Court decision saying he doesn’t understand a president’s recess powers under the Constitution.
The high court slapped the president hard over what it said were his illegal recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board in 2012. And it wasn’t just the court’s conservatives: This was a 9-0 decision.
The Constitution empowers the president to unilaterally fill high-level vacancies when Congress is in recess.
Both parties have used the power when their appointments were blocked on Capitol Hill. But Obama is the first president to decide on his own when the Senate was not in session so he could make these appointments.
Basically the court upheld the president’s sweeping right to make recess appointments but rejected the idea he can manufacture recesses when it suits him.
As a result, more than 1,000 NLRB cases in which these illegal board appointees were involved have now been invalidated.
The decision marked the 12th time in just over two years the justices have overruled the administration unanimously. That’s no mean feat for a court that is supposed to be bitterly divided along partisan lines.
At a time when critics complain the president is increasingly acting in a lawless manner, this latest decision reminds us that even Professor Obama’s own judicial appointees aren’t buying his constitutional arguments.