Unconstitutional recess appointments, the Fast and Furious scandal, the Keystone pipeline project, making Veterans Administration services more accessible, extending unemployment benefits and payroll tax cuts and many more topics were discussed when U.S. Senator Charles Grassley spent an hour answering questions from the two dozen citizens who met with him at Jamie’s Coffee Mill and Deli in Mount Ayr Tuesday, Jan. 17.
Grassley’s stop in Ringgold county was one of 34 he is making during January as part of his effort to visit each of Iowa’s 99 counties each year.
Recess appointments
Grassley expressed his unhappiness with the recent recess appointments made by President Barak Obama as well, and responded to a question about what Republicans in the Senate were going to do about it.
On Jan. 4, President Obama bypassed the Senate and appointed Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three members of the National Labor Relations Board. His move is highly controversial over whether he exceeded his constitutional power to make appointments during a Senate recess and so exceeded the power of his office, Grassley said.
“Our constitutionally outlined system of checks and balances among the three branches of our government is undermined when the President ignores the Constitution in making appointments,” Grasssley said. “The Constitution expressly assigns the Senate an advice and consent role in presidential nominations. The president nominates, the Senate acts to confirm or disprove the nomination.”
The Constitution says each house of Congress makes its own rules of proceeding. The administration argues the Senate was in recess during the President’s appointments, but that’s a red herring, Grassley said,
“In effect, the Senate is in session when it says it’s in session, not when the President says the Senate is in session,” Grassley said. “And, according to its own rules, the Senate was not in an extended recess during the President’s action. The Constitution does provide for the President to make appointments when the Senate is in a prolonged recess, but there are restrictions on those powers. And in addition to constitutional limitations, practice, tradition, and legal opinions all have influenced the process.”
If constitutional constructions are flouted, the President could choose to make all of his own appointments and skip the Senate’s advice and consent role,” Grassley said. “Similarly, if the Senate were to declare the law of the land without seeking a presidential signature or veto, that would be a clear violation of constitutional strictures. The White House would protest, just as the Senate is protesting now. The Constitution works to keep any one branch of the government from getting too powerful. It’s what keeps our country a republic, not a monarchy, the form of government our founders fled, fought, and rejected.”
A Justice Department opinion was cited by the president for the action, but Grassley is unconvinced.
“The conclusion of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel is at odds with the text of the U.S. Constitution and the administration’s own previous statements,” Grassley pointed out. “It fundamentally alters the careful separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches that the framers crafted in the Constitution. It relies on no Supreme Court decision for its conclusion that the Constitution allows the President to make these appointments. In fact, many of the administration’s conclusions are unsupported in law or the Constitution.”
The Justice Department recognizes that the courts might well disagree he noted. The action flies in the face of more than 90 years of historical practice.
“Taken together with a laundry list of other assertions of the power to act without Congress, this clearly is an escalation in a pattern of contempt for the elected representatives of the American people,” Grassley said. “The Senate will need to take action to check and balance President Obama’s blatant attempt to circumvent the Senate and the constitution, a claim of presidential power that the Bush Administration refused to make. No president since Theodore Roosevelt has tested the limitations on a president’s power to make recess appointments as President Obama has. It was seen as a blatant power grab when Theodore Roosevelt did it, and it strikes many of us the same way from President Obama.”
Fast and Furious scandal
Fast and Furious is a gunrunning investigation in Arizona that led to the illegal selling of about 2,000 high-powered guns with the idea that we would be able to arrest drug kingpins in Mexico, Grassley explained.
Not all of the guns got across the border and a couple of them showed up at the site where a Border Patrol officer was murdered.
“A lot of people from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was telling Washington, D.C. that this wouldn’t work and I don’t think anyone was arrested that was anything like a drug kingpin,” Grassley said.
Some of these people came to Grassley a year ago and the investigation is ongoing.
“The more we get into it, the more leads it brings,” Grassley said. “I’m not sure I can see an end to this but I’m going to keep pushing.”
One example of the problems with the bureaucracy was a request Grassley made in January that was answered in February. “The Justice Department said at that time there was nothing to the matter, but in a hearing in October the department admitted that its first correspondence had been a lie,” Grassley said. “We traced that to an assistant attorney general.”
For more, see the online or print editions of the Mount Ayr Record-News.