President Barack Obama violated the Constitution by making appointments to the federal labor board without Senate approval, a U.S. appeals court said in a ruling that calls hundreds of board decisions into question and may extend to the head of the new consumer finance agency, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., sided with Republican lawmakers in a unanimous opinion. The court held that Obama’s recess appointments to the U.S. National Labor Relations Board last year, made after Republicans refused to consider his nominees, were “constitutionally invalid” because the Senate wasn’t in recess at the time. “Allowing the president to define the scope of his own appointments power would eviscerate the Constitution’s separation of powers,” U.S. Circuit Judge David Sentelle wrote in a 46-page opinion -- one that may be cited in challenges to recess appointments throughout the federal government, possibly upending a longstanding presidential practice. In the near-term, the Jan. 25 ruling, one of about a dozen similar cases, may be used to undo more than 200 decisions by the NLRB over the past year, as well as regulations by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose director, Richard Cordray, was named at the same time as the board members. The White House said the ruling will not affect Cordray and is restricted to the company at issue. Republicans, meanwhile, have demanded the NLRB appointees quit immediately.
