President Obama’s recess appointment angers Republicans

By Karoun Demirjian

Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2012 | 4:36 p.m.

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama announced today that he will circumvent the Senate and appoint a head of the new financial protection bureau while Congress is on break, a move that has Republicans seeing red.

“When Congress refuses to act and as a result hurts our economy and puts our people at risk, then I have an obligation as president to do what I can without them,” Obama told an audience in Ohio. “Every day that we waited was another day when millions of Americans were left unprotected … that’s inexcusable. It’s wrong. And I refuse to take no for an answer.”

The White House went into campaign mode last month to press a handful of Senate Republicans, including Nevada’s Dean Heller, to help give Richard Cordray, his pick to head a new national financial watchdog bureau, the votes he’d need to actually start the job.

Heller and the 10 other Republicans who received the pressure refused; not because Cordray was objectionable, but because they despised the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau he was slated to represent.

“As the only member of the Nevada delegation to vote against the Wall Street bailout, I strongly believe these institutions should be held accountable,” Heller said in a statement, listing the changes he’d asked be made to the CFPB: establish a board of directors, give small businesses a voice in its governance, and make it subject to a congressional appropriations process.

The Obama administration and other defenders of the CFPB — including Sen. Harry Reid — have said the changes Heller and others demanded will subject a body that’s supposed to be providing consumer protection to political infighting.

“Republicans have been trying to make an end run around the law by denying this watchdog a leader … in an effort to substantially weaken the agency,” Reid said in a statement. “Americans are looking to us to find common ground, not grind the business of the American people to a halt until one side gets everything it wants.”

“It’s long past time to put the interests of middle class Nevadans ahead of the Wall Street billionaires,” Nevada Democratic Rep. Shelley Berkley said in a statement. She would not, as a member of the House, have opportunity to vote on Cordray’s nomination, but she is running to unseat Heller in the Senate in 2012, and has been piling on the public campaign against Heller’s stance on Cordray.

But while Democrats see the recess appointment as a necessary act to get around a recalcitrant Republican Senate minority, Republicans say it’s evidence Obama flouts the will of the people, since the Senate wasn’t really on enough of a break to make this kind of appointment legitimate.

The president has the right to make executive appointments while the Senate — the body that regularly has to approve them — is on break; the appointments are then good until the end of the next congressional session, at which point the Senate must approve the appointee for him or her to continue serving in the post.

But past practice has been that the Senate has to be on a break for at least 10 days before the president has authority to move without the Senate’s help. Fear of leaving such a window open is why in the last few years, as partisan gridlock has solidified in D.C., the Senate rarely fully goes on a break, holding so-called pro forma sessions every few days to ensure that Congress is not in recess, so that no recess appointments can be made.

Only problem is, that whole 10-day thing is more customary than it is proscribed constitutionally, and thus the president can break the presumed rule without breaking any real rules.

It doesn’t make Republicans any less angry though — and Obama only added to their fury when he announced he’d also be making three recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board: Sharon Block, Terence Flynn and Richard Griffin.

Cordray’s nomination had been lingering since last summer, but Obama had only formally submitted Block and Griffin’s names to the Senate two days before everyone went home for Christmas.

“What the President did today sets a terrible precedent that could allow any future President to completely cut the Senate out of the confirmation process, appointing his nominees immediately after sending their names up to Congress,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement.

But Obama — and Senate Democrats, who aren’t criticizing his moves – seem to be less concerned about customary procedure than they are about promises they made to consumers — even if America is still divided about what it thinks about the CFPB, a product of the Dodd-Frank bill, and the country’s foremost labor arbitration board.

“The American people deserve to have qualified public servants fighting for them every day, whether it is to enforce new consumer protections or uphold the rights of working Americans,” Obama said in a statement with the announcement. “We can’t wait…I am proud to appoint these fine individuals to get to work for the American people.”