Daily Archives: 12 January 2012

The Desperation of the Left

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Now we have Larry Tribe, the esteemed Harvard professor of constitutional law, contorting himself in an attempt to justify President Obama’s unconstitutional pseudo-recess appointments.

It seems, though, that Tribe already had commented on the legitimacy of appointments of the Obama style some years back in the context of the Bush the Younger administration.  Adam White, a DC lawyer, writes about Tribe’s bias (some might suggest horrific hypocrisy) in The Weekly Standard.  White’s commentary is so clear, that I’ll just quote extensively below.

In support of Obama, Tribe asserts that the president’s power to deem the Senate to be “in recess” and then make recess appointments “is clearly stated in the Constitution….”  But against Bush, Tribe argued that “[t]he text, structure, purpose, function, and pre-1921 history of the Recess Appointments Clause all confirm…that the President may not make recess appointments during intra-session Senate breaks.”

In support of Obama, Tribe argues that intra-session recess appointments are especially justified when the Senate is deliberately “frustrat[ing] presidential appointments.”  But against Bush, he argued the opposite: recess appointments are all the more illegitimate when the nominee in question already had been the subject of Senate debate yet “failed to obtain enough votes to go forward under Senate rules.”

In support of Obama, Tribe argues that the Senate made itself “unavailable” by largely leaving Washington. But against Bush, he scoffed at the notion that the Senate was ever truly unavailable, thanks to modern technology…Senate business “can easily resume, if necessary, owing to modern communications and transportation.”

In support of Obama, Tribe invokes Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist 67 for the proposition that recess appointments, even intra-session appointments such as Cordray’s, are justified when “necessary for the public service to fill without delay.”  Against Bush, by contrast, he invoked Federalist 67 for the proposition that “recess appointments would be ‘necessary,’ and thus permissible, only outside the ‘session of the Senate”—i.e., never during type of intra-session break that President Obama exploited last week.

In defense of Obama’s recess appointments, Tribe said that the president was setting a precedent that would apply “only in instances of transparent and intolerable burdens on his authority.”  But when Bush made recess appointments, Tribe warned of a slippery slope toward tyranny[.]

Hmm….  Still, I suppose Tribe was at least partially right.  We are presently sliding down that slippery slope.

More on (Un)Employment

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The Weekly Standard‘s Jay Cost has some thoughts on the recently reported headline jobs data.  The perspective into which these headline data fit can be neatly summarized in a table and a graph.

One aspect of this perspective is the overall economic situation in which the present data sit.  This table shows that situation for the last several Presidential election years. It’s true enough that the President Obama’s Employment growth number isn’t too different from those of past presidents in election years.  Keep in mind, though, that Obama’s number is for employment growing from an historically low employment condition: in December 2009, after a year of Obama Stimulus, unemployment was over 10%, with 15 million Americans unemployed.  Obama’s policies in 2011 have produced 0.52% annual growth against that start.  In short, we’re maintaining/growing employment very slightly at our present high unemployment rate, just as during the Clinton and Bush the Younger years, we maintained/grew employment very slightly in a time of already full employment.

Now look at those 2011 GDP and Income growth rate numbers.  They haven’t been that bad—our economy hasn’t been in such sad shape—since the Carter years.  That nearly flat employment growth rate is occurring in a terribly weak economy.

Now let’s look at the unemployment rate itself.  Cost’s graph is informative here.

Just in case the legend isn’t clear/legible, the blue line is the Official unemployment rate, as reported by the Obama administration.  The red line is the “Shadow” unemployment rate, about which neither this administration nor the NLMSM want to talk much.

As Cost points out, much of the decline shown on the Official unemployment (but not all, to be sure) is caused by the shrinking work force, as long-term unemployed give up and stop looking for jobs.  Indeed, as Cost says

Because of the length of this jobs recession, the number of people who claim to be in the workforce is near a 30-year low, and it has dropped substantially since Obama first took office (from 65.7 percent to 64 percent).

and

If we recalculate the unemployment rate based on the percentage of adults who said they were in the workforce at the start of Obama’s tenure, we get [the “Shadow” unemployment rate shown by the red line].