Marathon Pundit: NLRB overreach: Meet and greet, but no advise and consent

University of Chicago

President Obama used to teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago. His students should ask for their money back.

From the Heritage Foundation's Foundry blog:

U.S. senators never got a chance to question or vote on President Obama’s illegal appointees to the National Labor Relations Board. Now that they’ve been installed at the board, however, senators and their staff will at least have the chance to meet the individuals they were prevented from properly vetting.

The NLRB informed congressional staffers Wednesday that they would be holding an informal "meet and greet" with the three non-recess appointed board members on Thursday at 3 p.m., according to an email from the NLRB's special counsel for congressional and intergovernmental affairs obtained by The Heritage Foundation.

I am writing to invite two members of Senator [redacted] staff to join us this Thursday at 3 pm for a small "meet and greet" with the new board members. The event will be attended by NLRB staff and a few folks from the Hill. Please let me know if anyone on the staff is interested and if so, which two members will be joining us (I need to get the names over to security). I apologize for the short notice – this is all coming together rather quickly.

On may way to Michigan last weekend, I drove through Indiana. I'll have to be more careful when I return. From Hoosier Access: Union protester calls for legislators to be "tarred and feathered"

Look for it in the video at the 45 second mark.

The Workforce Fairness Business is taking the overreach battle to the White House.

The Washington Examiner:

A group that fights the abusive influence of big labor on workers and businesses has taken to the White House's "We the People" petition website to urge him to rescind his recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, which took place when the Senate was not actually in recess.

Wall Street Journal (paid subscription required):

On Friday evening, Republicans began their legal counterattack against President Obama's recess appointments to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the National Labor Relations Board. But they took aim at the wrong target.

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley, writing for all eight Republican members on the Judiciary Committee, has asked Attorney General Eric Holder to elaborate the Justice Department's position on the key issues. Their request seems reasonable, since the elite group in the Department's Office of Legal Counsel has traditionally served as the executive branch's authoritative spokesman on matters of high legal importance.

But this is no longer true. Increasingly, it is the White House, not the Justice Department, that is making the tough legal calls—without the disciplined staff work and traditions of independence that have permitted the Office of Legal Counsel to win legal credibility over the past 75 years.

This shift in legal authority is a bitter legacy of the George W. Bush administration, where the White House exerted intense pressure on members of the Office of Legal Council to get the decisions it wanted and promulgated a stream of remarkably superficial presidential signing statements nullifying parts of congressional statutes on problematic constitutional grounds. While President Obama has distanced himself from this legacy, he has relied on other techniques to propel the same shift of power in his direction.

One of Obama's "recess appointments" was Robert Griffin, and attorney for a corrupt union. From the Washington Examiner:

Mike Quigley says he's "a union guy, and I'll be one 'til the day I die."

But in 2007, Quigley, a member of the International Union of Operating Engineers IUOE) Local 150, which covers much of Indiana, Illinois, and Iowa, was fed up with the corruption he felt pervaded his local.

So he teamed up with an insurgent candidate to unseat Bill Dugan, Local 150’s longtime president and business manager. Quigley created a rudimentary website to document the malfeasance of the local’s leadership under Dugan.

But IUOE headquarters stepped in, passing a rule that forced all candidates to password-protect their campaign websites, allowing access only to union members and barring the general public.

Griffith pushed that rule. That's something he would have been asked about during a Senate confirmation hearing.

Human Events:

Key Republican Senators are bracing for legislative battles and Constitutional challenges to President Barack Obama's unprecedented end-run around Congress to install several controversial political appointees.

Obama announced the decision Wednesday to make the so-called recess appointments -- even though the Senate is not in recess -- putting Richard Cordray in charge of a contentious new consumer protection agency and also naming three appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) – Sharon Block, Richard Griffin and Terence F. Flynn.

"Business as we know it in the Senate is over for this administration in terms of accomplishing anything legislatively or finding any cooperation from this side of the aisle," said Sen. John Barrasso (R.–Wyo.). "He has poisoned the well."

"Apparently, advise and consent called for in the Constitution doesn't apply to this Chicago-style politician. He’s more interested in rewarding his friends than living under the law Americans need to abide by," Barrasso said.

Bloomberg:

Citigroup Inc's lobbyist said President Barack Obama's decision to make Richard Cordray head of the new financial watchdog agency wasn’t a “recess” appointment and may face a court challenge.

Naming Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau while the Senate held "pro forma" sessions left the White House open to legal action, especially from financial firms facing new rules, Candida Wolff, Citigroup’s executive vice president for global government affairs, said in an interview today.

"I don't think this was a recess appointment," said Wolff, who was chief lobbyist for President George W. Bush and now represents the third-biggest U.S. bank by assets. "I struggle with the fact that a session is still a session, and you can have business within that session."

From the office of US Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK):

President Obama's defiance of decades of legislative precedent is troubling enough, but using recess appointments for these particular offices is especially disturbing. The NLRB demonstrated its capacity to destroy jobs in 2011 when it brought a lawsuit to prevent Boeing from opening a new facility in South Carolina that would create 1000 jobs — all because it deemed the state's right-to-work law insufficiently deferential to labor unions.

Furthermore, two of the three NLRB recess appointments installed individuals who were first nominated on Dec. 17, providing no opportunity for congressional hearings. Stacking the five-member NLRB board even further with unvetted, liberal members guarantees a continuation of its anti-jobs agenda.

Likewise, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau poses threats to our still struggling economy. Conservatives have opposed this new bureaucracy since its creation by the flawed Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill.

One of the biggest concerns is that the sweeping, insufficiently defined authority of the agency rests solely with its director. As Senate Banking Committee member Richard Shelby, R-Ala., explained, new CFPB director Cordray “will impact whether Americans can buy a home, a car, or even basic household goods” because he has the authority to "single-handedly determine the financial products consumers can buy, as well as which consumers have access to credit and which do not."

And finally, a press release from the earlier-mentioned Workforce Fairness Institute:

Justice Department Contradicts Itself On Recess Appointments

Washington, D.C. (January 12, 2011) – The Workforce Fairness Institute (WFI) today released the following statement in response to the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) Office of Legal Counsel releasing an opinion backing the legality of President Obama’s recess appointments in spite of the fact that very same office previously disputed the finding as did Obama’s solicitor general office:

"The lengths President Obama will go to payback Big Labor appear limitless. First, he recess appoints Richard Griffin and Sharon Block to the National Labor Relations Board without giving the Senate any time whatsoever to conduct its Constitutional responsibility to advise and consent, and next, his Justice Department issues a legal opinion which disputes previous findings from that very same office," said Fred Wszolek, spokesperson for the Workforce Fairness Institute (WFI). "And to make matters worse for the White House, its own deputy solicitor general argued before the U.S. Supreme Court against the legality of the kind of recess appointments made by this president. President Obama has lost all credibility on the issue of nominations and recess appointments and his handling of this issue has demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that he is more concerned with carrying the water of union bosses than adhering to the Constitution and turning around the economy."