Whose abuse of power?

Sunday, Jan. 8, 2012 | 2 a.m.

President Barack Obama made waves last week with four recess appointments, naming Richard Cordray as the first chief of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and filling three vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board.

The move, which avoids confirmation votes in the Senate, was immediately attacked by Republicans, who questioned the legality of the appointments, saying the Senate isn’t technically in recess.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said the president “arrogantly circumvented the American people.” House Speaker John Boehner called the president’s move “an extraordinary and entirely unprecedented power grab,” and said there would be “a devastating effect on the (Constitution’s) checks and balances.”

The Republican leaders’ hyperbole only serves to rally their party’s base in an election year. However, before the president’s critics start fulminating and putting on their overly righteous indignation, perhaps they will consider something that makes this particularly unusual: Presidents typically use recess appointments when the opposing party controls the Senate and blocks their appointments, but Obama’s party controls the Senate.

So, what gives?

Using Senate rules, Republicans have stonewalled the nominees, which isn’t unusual on its own until you consider why. The Republican opposition isn’t based on the quality of the nominees or their experience. Instead, it’s based on their ideological objections to the agencies to which they were nominated. They want to block the nominees to stop the work of the government.

Republicans have blocked Cordray’s nomination because they think the law that created the bureau provides too much regulation of Wall Street and financial institutions. (Heaven forbid that there is actually — gasp! — regulation to protect consumers and prevent another economic meltdown.) Republicans have offered to allow Cordray’s nomination to move forward if the law is watered down.

By blocking Cordray’s nomination, they prevent the bureau from getting up and running. By blocking the nominations to the labor board, which they have waged a long war against, they stop work there because the board couldn’t muster a quorum.

And yet they have the gall to claim the president is trying to grab power?

It’s not the president, who is trying to run the government, making the power grab but Republicans in Congress. They have far overstepped their bounds. The Senate’s role is to provide “advice and consent” on nominees, not to hold hearings on the agency.

In the conservative Heritage Foundation’s guide to the Constitution, Northwestern Law School professor John McGinnis writes that the founders considered a clear role for the Senate in nominations. He says George Washington “wrote in his diary that Thomas Jefferson and John Jay agreed with him that the Senate’s powers ‘extend no farther than to an approbation or disapprobation of the person nominated by the President...’”

For a party that has spent so much time talking about the Constitution, you would think they would know all of this.

If Republicans don’t like these agencies, they can do something about it in Congress by changing the law. That is, after all, Congress’ role — it did create both the labor board and the consumer protection bureau. If they think the agencies are unconstitutional, they can sue and let the courts decide, as they’re doing with the health care law.

Or, they can continue down this hypocritical path and show the pubic how they are abusing their constitutional power just to play politics.