Looks that way if you examine the issues surrounding the holiday recess appointments made by President Obama. Some legal scholars, The Hill reports, have some doubts that the appointment of Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and two more December appointments will pass muster.
“It’s untested ground. If I were a judge, I could write out an opinion either way. There’s no clear precedent,” said Charles Fried, a constitutional expert at Harvard Law School who served as solicitor general under former President Reagan.
The Justice Department has argued that the pro forma sessions the Senate has held since Dec. 17 do not constitute genuine sessions of work and that the upper chamber has been, for all practical purposes, on vacation.
But Fried, who has sided with the Obama administration on challenges to the constitutionality of healthcare reform, said courts might not be willing to judge what qualifies as working sessions of the Senate, especially considering how much time the chamber spends on quorum calls lately.
“A court might very well say that we don’t want to start saying something the Senate calls a session is not a real session because not a lot of senators are around,” Fried said. “One might say that this whole year is one which is not a real session.”...The Hill
I like the way Fried thinks. In terms of jobs well done -- hey, jobs done at all! -- one could invalidate the entire Congress dating from early January, 2011. Obama gets his appointments; the Senate is disgraced -- officially, not just in the minds of most Americans.
