The Senate didn’t act on Andrew Traver, so the question becomes, will Obama recess appoint him? My money will be on yes, which will indicate the time of detente with the White House may be over.
19 thoughts on “Recess Appointment?”
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Don’t know. The administration doesn’t seem interested in a gun fight.
Obama has bigger fish to fry, and is way smarter than that. He may try to sneak in some bad appointments, but he’ll back down in the face of bad publicity. All bets are off in the second term, though.
I think he WILL do a recess appointment… The administration just doesn’t get it…
ObamMAO can’t make a “recess” appointment, since Congress is not in “recess”. It is OVER! Reid did us a favor by not bringing this jerk up for a vote. If The Won wants him as ubersturmfuerher of the BATFAGS, he’ll have to re-appoint him and start over.
I disagree with Fiftycal’s reasoning. The Senate is in sine die adjournment and can be reconvened anytime before Jan. 5, 2011. While for practical purposes this Senate is over, in legal terms it exists until the 112th Congress begins.
“Sec. 2. The Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate, or their respective designees, acting jointly after consultation with the Minority Leader of the House and the Minority Leader of the Senate, shall notify the Members of the House and the Senate, respectively, to reassemble at such place and time as they may designate if, in their opinion, the public interest shall warrant it.”
Even without this, Obama has the power to make an intersession appointment which is what this would be.
He’ll appoint count on it, and while there is nothing we can do we should call every advisor/czar/director in and question them as extensively/embarrassingly as possible….
Can he just make him “Gun Czar” like the rest of his illegally appointed minions – forget about normal the legal crap?
We need to take-down some of these “Czar” appointments or pass a law to abolish them.
C’mon, he won’t make a recess appointment, he just said he’s going to focus on the economy. He said that, so it must be true. Picking a fight with gun owners isn’t focusing on the economy.
@John – you are critiquing the logic skills of someone who calls Obama ‘Obamao’, the BATFE the BATFAGS not to mention the rest of his gibberish?
Bush had almost as many czars as Obama, and more appointees.
Recess appointments are authorized by Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which states:
“ The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.
To wit: On August 1, 2005, Bush made a recess appointment of John Bolton, to serve as U.S. representative to the United Nations.[5] Bolton had also been the subject of a Senate filibuster. The filibuster concerned documents that the White House refused to release, which Democrats suggested may contain proof of Bolton’s abusive treatment and coercion of staff members or of his improper use of National Security Agency communications intercepts regarding U.S. citizens. Having failed to win Senate confirmation, he resigned his office in December 2006 concurrently with the adjournment of the 109th Congress.
So ObamMAO could appoint that asshole, but he would have to resign before 1/5/11.
BTW, you forgot to criticize my use of the NAZI term.
I’m sure you would be happy with the kinder, gentler SOCIALIST that we have as Dear Leader appointing the anti-gun Chicago “agent in charge” BATFAG leader, but I won’t.
Maybe you can use your “superior intellect” to understand my “gibberish”.
This sort of appointment combined with the registration of long guns requirement seems to signal a significant shift.
@Chris: don’t confuse BATFE’s wishlist with policy direction from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. One of the complaints I have with this administration is that they don’t have enough control over the bureaucrats of the various agencies. And the bureaucrats have been making embarrassing gaffes recently.
If this turns into a recess appointment, I’ll re-evaluate, but the current administration does not seem to be too keen on the idea of facing off the NRA directly on a strictly firearms issue. (Appointments to SCOTUS notwithstanding – hence the disclaimer).
Fiftycal: The last time I checked, a recess appointment lasts till the end of the *next* session of the Congress. In the Bolton example you gave he was recess appointed in the middle of the session in 2005 and resigned just before the end of the next session in 2006.
So as long as Obama waits until a recess in the next session of the Congress (which starts 1/5/2011) Traver could stay until the end of 2012.
Recess appointment carries a political cost. I have yet to see any evidence that Obama wants to open that wallet after the healthcare fiasco; preferring Congress to take the slings and arrows of outraged voters.
Ian Argent: Perhaps … my question is, why appoint such a gun-grabber in the first place? He could have left the position formally unfilled (acting director, which I think has been the case since it was rolled into DHS) or put a generic “law and order” type in there who didn’t have overt anti-gun positions on record.
Maybe it’s internal Chicago politics?
Because he’s the style over substance man?
He pretty much had to appoint someone, the postition is unfilled. And he had to choose a gun-grabber to please the base. But he put him up for Senate confirmation so the blame falls on Harry Reid for not getting it done, this way.
We’re most of us knowledgeable about such things as “recess appointments”; but John and Jane Q Public aren’t.
You know, the more I think about this, though… Why put him up before the Senate in the first place? If he went up and got shot down, he’d be extremely unlikely to be recess-appointed; picture the firestorm involved in recess-appointing after failure to confirm in the lame-duck of a “friendly” congress after the new Congress is seated.
I’m beginning to wonder how anti-gun Obama personally (as opposed to policitally) is. He has to be “officially” anti-gun to come out of Chicago politics; but what has he or his people done that’s both directly anti-gun and actually pushed?
@Ian – please dont question our touchstone belief that Obama is a ‘gun grabber’. It’s an article of faith.
That’s me, the iconoclast.
As I said, I do believe he will act in a half-hearted gun-banning fashion, in an attempt to please the base; but not follow through so as not to draw the ire of the NRA.
Obama (and myself, I’m about a year older than he) are from a different cultural generation that the Clintons, G. W. Bush, Newt, etc., they’re from the earlier part of the demographic Baby Boom. One big difference is illustrated by how the Clintons are committed culture warriors; you might remember that immediately after the 1993 inauguration the Administration was consumed by the issue of gays in the military. By comparison Obama has not exactly been pushing the issue until very recently.
I see guns as being another cultural issue in this way, one that for him is far down in priorities compared to economic class warfare/socialism/Marxism/whatever you want to call it. Which is something he’s very consistently pushed in both words and deeds.
So in that respect I’d agree with Ian: Obama at a personal level probably just isn’t into our issue as many of us worried he might be. Sure, if given an opportunity he’d ban them, but in his mind he’s got bigger fish to fry.
(And to a certain extent he’s right, if Obamacare isn’t repealed or doesn’t collapse from its own contradictions and we end up with nationalized health care his side will have won the game in the long term.)
We also have to factor in the Democrat’s slow but eventual realization that gun control is massively unpopular. They kept getting hit with this starting with the 1994 mid-term election after passage of the Brady Bill and the “AW” ban, and Gore’s loss in 2000—which in part was due to his support for gun control—finally pounded the message home (of course not to all, and, hey, G. W. Bush before then and all through his presidency said he’d sign a new AW ban if it arrived on his desk).