Daily Archives: 26 January 2013

The Blinders of the Liberal

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Juan Williams has a piece in The Wall Street Journal that illustrates this quite nicely.  He writes of the “Clouds over [President Barack] Obama’s Second Term,” and surely there are such clouds.  But he couches his discussion in this way.

…there is no sign that the GOP’s current goal is anything other than hastening this president’s transition to lame-duck status and stopping any Democrat from succeeding him in 2016.

…Republicans have made it difficult for the president to get any bill passed without a supermajority of 60 votes because of the minority party’s increased use of the filibuster in the modern era.

Even leaving aside the fact that the rise in the use of the filibuster includes several Congressional sessions of Democratic Party minority, this is an interesting argument.  Williams is claiming that Republican opposition to Obama’s bills couldn’t possibly be because those bills are terrible ideas.  No, being universally fine, the only purpose for opposing them must be personal—to harm Obama.

But this is entirely consistent with Williams’ next point.

…one factor for anyone judging Mr Obama is race.

Really, Mr Williams?  Have we met?  Certainly it’s no secret to my half-dozen readers that I disagree, with considerable enthusiasm, with nearly all that Obama has done or said.  But on what basis do you ascribe my opposition to race?  I reject your racist slur.

Along these lines, Williams offers this:

Even among his liberal supporters, the conventional wisdom is that Mr Obama’s leadership style is lacking in forcefulness because he is the “first black” in the White House.  By that line of thinking, he is not allowed to be too forceful in his emotions, or he will risk being seen as scary—an “angry black man.”

This is another manufactured beef, or it’s a concession that Liberals generally are racist.  Certainly no Conservative whom I know looked at Obama as anything other than a bad president.  Not a bad black president.  And not, even when he did show anger, an “angry black man.”

Where are you getting this stuff, Mr Williams?

There is Hope

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Yesterday, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (the court of jurisdiction, for those who are interested in such things, because this is the appellate court for matters pertaining to the NLRB orders) ruled unanimously that President Barack Obama’s “recess” appointments to the National Labor Relations Board of Richard Griffin, Sharon Block, and Terence Flynn (the latter of whom resigned from the NLRB shortly after) were “constitutionally invalid” because the Senate was not in recess at the time of the appointments.

Writing for the court, Judge David Sentelle had this to say, according to Bloomberg at the above link:

Considering the text, history and structure of the Constitution, these appointments were invalid from their inception[.]

The court expanded on that point in equally clear terms:

…the inescapable conclusion that the Framers intended something specific by the term “the Recess,” and that it was something different than a generic break in proceedings [an adjournment].

…

The natural interpretation of the [Recess Appointments] Clause is that the Constitution is noting a difference between “the Recess” and the “Session.”  Either the Senate is in session, or it is in the recess.  If it has broken for three days within an ongoing session, it is not in “the Recess.”

The court noted further that the Senate was in session at the time of these…appointments.

…the President made his three appointments to the Board on January 4, 2012, after Congress began a new session on January 3 and while that new session continued.

This also has implications for Richard Cordray and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau he was “appointed” to chair, since he was put up in that same now known to be illegal batch of “appointments” as those NLRB folks.  The thousands of pages of regulations that board has already written now are of only questionable validity; although the question here isn’t so cut and dried: the CFPB had a quorum, and the matter here is the necessity of a formally seated chairman.  It also lends color to his nomination, for the current Senate’s consideration, to that same post.

Apparently, though, there are limits to Obama’s fiat governance.