First challenge on new Obama appointees : SCOTUSblog
Legal challenges to Obama's recess appointments have begun. Business groups are pursuing the challenge largely because the appointments allowed the National Labor Relations Board to start doign business again. Replicans had hoped to defange the board by reducing it to two people - denyign it quorum, meaning it would not be able to issue rules concerning labor unions.
Constitutional questiosn aside, that's what the fight is about:
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson in Washington is hearing business challenges to a rule, not yet put into effect by the NLRB, that would require as many as six million employers to put up in their workplaces a permanent poster that notifies their employees of the legal rights they have under federal labor law. That requirement, the so-called “notice posting” rule, is now due to go into effect on April 30. It had been set to go into effect at the end of this month, but the Board postponed it in December at Judge Jackson’s specific request while she ponders the challenge (pending in National Association of Manufacturers, et al., v. NLRB, District Court docket 11-1629).
Although that rule was put into final form by the Board before the President early this month gave “recess appointments” to three new members, the motion filed Friday argued that those appointments are “unconstitutional, null and void,” reducing the Board to only two members, and thus the Board “no longer has authority to implement or enforce the Notice Rule on its purported effective date of April 30, 2012.” (Under the Supreme Court decision in 2010, in New Process Steel, L.P. v. NLRB, the Board cannot take action with only two of its allotted five members.)
The recess appointments were meant to provide the NLRB with the memebers necessary to constitute a quorum.
By the way, the simple constitutional questions seem to be: Is a "pro-forma session" of Congress a "session." No legislative business is condicted during these sessions, and there is no quorum to conduct business. The only purpose seems to be to deny the presient the chance to make recess appointments and to preent the exectuive branch from conducting business. Does the president not have recourse to act in that situation?
