Reid backs President Obama on ‘Meet the Press’ over recent appointments

By Karoun Demirjian

Sunday, Jan. 15, 2012 | 2:17 p.m.

Though he holds his authority over Congress very dear, Sen. Harry Reid offered an impassioned defense Sunday of President Barack Obama’s right to circumvent the body and make the recess appointments he did earlier this month despite strong Republican objections.

Reid, appearing on NBC’s "Meet the Press," said Obama “did the right thing” to appoint Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and three members of the five-person National Labor Relations Board while Congress was on break, even if members weren’t on a long-enough break to make such recess appointments roundly acceptable.

“The president is entitled by our Constitution to appoint people. The Republicans have made it so the National Labor Relations Board — they didn’t want it to even work. So he had to do recess appointments,” Reid told "Meet the Press" host David Gregory. “Consumers need protection and that’s why this was such a good move by the president.”

Under the normal rules of procedure, when Congress is in session the Senate has to approve any presidential appointments before the appointed can get the go-ahead to start the job. Executive branch appointees and judges are subject to this Senate review.

But when Congress isn’t in session, the president has the right to make recess appointments, bypassing the Senate’s review. Appointees who come to their offices this way can keep their jobs until the end of the next congressional session, but the congressional approval is mandatory for them to continue.

To keep the president from exercising this constitution authority, Congress has gotten in the pattern of holding pro-forma sessions every few days during the traditional holidays. The point of the president’s recess appointment power is to be able to contend with emergencies, and it’s become custom that things don’t clear that threshold until Congress has to been out of session about 10 days. The quick gavel-in, gavel-out pro forma sessions are usually every three days or so.

The fact that the president moved to make these appointments in a pro-forma filled recess made many Republicans furious.

“What the President did today sets a terrible precedent that could allow any future President to completely cut the Senate out of the confirmation process,” Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell said earlier this month, on the day Obama announced his intention to make the recess appointments.

Technically, there’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president can’t act on a congressional break of any length.

“You know, the recess appointment deal is something I came up with during the Bush years,” Reid said Sunday morning. “The reason Bush didn’t do recess appointments during the time we had this so-called recess, is because I worked with him. We gave President Bush hundreds and hundreds of people: He didn’t have to worry about recess appointments because we were working with him.

“I believed then, I believe now that a president has the right to make appointments,” Reid continued.

The potential for precedent seems to matter less to Reid than the political pitfalls of the present: a stalemated Congress that is at an annual crossroads.

“I hope the Tea Party doesn’t have the influence this next year that they had in the previous year, because it’s been really bad for this country,” Reid said Sunday morning, predicting a few moments later the inevitable withering of the grass-roots movement that swept scores of right-wing Republicans into Congress in 2010. “I think the Tea Party’s dying out as the economy’s getting better slowly,” he said.

Reid characterized the Republican party of 2011 as “obstructionism on steroids” — a phrase he repeated three times during the interview (which means we can expect it to be a refrain in 2012).

And he surmised that the experience of the last year would put his Democrats in fighting shape to overcome the odds — there are 23 Democratic seats up for grabs, compared to only 10 Republican seats — come election time.

“We’re doing extremely well,” he said. “We’re going to do just fine come November.”