Recess Appointments: A Constitutional Response to a Non-Functioning Senate
By Mary Mostert (08/05/05)
President Bush’s use of a recess appointment to fill the vacant position of United Nations ambassador is being criticized by the Democrats, who appear to be opposing John Bolton primarily because they oppose any attempt to reform the UN. They have blocked the full senate from being able to vote on the Bolton nomination with only 38 of the 100 senators voting against the motion to end debate on the issue.
The Los Angeles Times, MSNBC and other liberal media outlets have been particularly annoyed by a comment made by Bolton that “"removing the top 10 floors from the United Nations building would have no effect whatsoever.” Although few Americans even know what the people in the top 10 floors of the United Nations building actually DO, it is a comment that causes people like Democrat Senator Dodd of Connecticut to undermine the majority of the people in Congress elected by the voters, along with undermining the president and the United States itself by saying such things as:
"I just think Mr. Bolton's the bad choice here. ... He's damaged goods. This is a person who lacks credibility."
"This will be the first U.N. ambassador since 1948 that we've ever sent there under a recess appointment. That's not what you want to send up, a person that doesn't have the confidence of the Congress, and so many people who have urged that he not be sent up to do that job."
Of course, over the years, it has been Democrat presidents who have made the most radical recess appointments. For example, four of the five first black appellate judges were recess appointment. Judge William Hastie, recess appointed to the Third Circuit by President Truman in 1949; Judge Thurgood Marshall, recess appointed to the Second Circuit by President Kennedy in 1961; Judge Spottswood Robinson recess appointed to the D.C. District Court by President Kennedy in 1961; and Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, recess appointed to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania by President Johnson in 1964. Likewise, two of the three first women judges received recess appointments: Judge Burnita Shelton Matthews, recess appointed by President Truman to the D.C. District Court in 1949 and Judge Sarah Hughes, recess appointed by President Kennedy to the Northern District of Texas in 1961.
Those six recess appointments were all made by Democrat Presidents with Democrat controlled Senates. The opposition to those appointments of blacks to federal courts came mostly from Southern Democrats. Thurgood Marshall was appointed 6 years later to the U.S. Supreme Court and went on to write some of major decisions that changed the nature of US Criminal Justice by allowing criminals almost unlimited “rights” to circumvent punishment for even capital crimes.
During Bill Clinton’s 8 years in the White House, he made 140 recess appointments, so the use of recess appointments is not only constitutional, but quite common.
It was the Democrats use of recess appointments, and Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s attempt to enlarge the supreme court from 9 to 17 judges, in order to stop the Supreme Court from declaring most of his socialist plans during the Great Depression, that mark the most glaring efforts on the part of a president and/or a congress from trying to circumvent the Constitution’s “separate but equal” provisions.
The effort is again being made today by the current MINORITY in the Congress, to impose political opinions that are not representative of the MAJORITY. At least, when Roosevelt was trying to seize control of the judiciary in the 1930s the PEOPLE had elected both him and a Congress that was more than two-thirds Democrat.
Today that is no longer the case. The voters selected a Republican, George W. Bush and a Congress that is also more than 50% Republican. In order to thwart the will of the people, this time the Democrats are not allowing the majority party to even VOTE in the full Senate on the President’s nominees.
This has created a situation where one branch of the three branches of the US Government, the Congress, which is the only branch that is actually voted into office by the people on a representational basis, is non-functioning in a time of war. The House of Representatives is the only branch of the Federal Government that is democratically chosen. Regardless of size or population, each of the 50 states has an equal vote. The President is chosen by the Electoral College and appoints are made by the president with the advise and consent of the non-democratic Senate, when it is in session. When it is not in session, the president can and frequently DOES keep the country from experiencing dead-lock by making recess appointments.
So, what we really have happening here is a challenge to the right of the people to have ANY say in what the Federal Government does. Since appointed federal judges are not voted into office on a vote of the people, and the Senate represents their State, the President is the only elected official in the country chosen by a vote of the people through the Electoral College.
For five years a minority group in the Senate has blocked the ability of the entire Senate from voting on key nominees, such as John Bolton. That has blocked the president’s authority to nominate key candidates with the “advice and consent of the senate.”
The solution to the current gridlock in Congress is the 2006 election The voters need to be paying attention and planning to oust Senators who have a history of obstructing the constitutional process and the will of the majority of the people through the kind of undemocratic and dictatorial policies that were used in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s to obstruct full citizenship rights for blacks and women.
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