Supreme Court Rebukes Obama Lawlessness
By Matthew Vadum
In a humiliating rebuke to President Obama, the Supreme Court affirmed in a labor relations case yesterday that there continue to be constitutionally prescribed limits to the powers of the nation’s Chief Executive.
The Court invalidated three recess appointments the president made in an attempt to unconstitutionally manipulate federal labor relations policy.
Justices held unanimously in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning Thursday that Obama overreached on Jan. 4, 2012 when he recess-appointed three members to the NLRB without bothering to wait for the U.S. Senate to recess. Obama’s goal was to pack the under-staffed NLRB with likeminded leftists and give the board the quorum it previously lacked to conduct official business.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) lauded the Court’s clampdown on “President Obama’s unlawful abuse of the president’s recess appointments power.”
“This marks the 12th time since January 2012 that the Supreme Court has unanimously rejected the Obama administration’s calls for greater federal executive power,” Cruz said.
A delighted Michael Savage said on his radio show: “America just won a 9-to-0 victory over an emerging dictatorship.” (The full opinion is available at the Supreme Court’s website.)
In this post-constitutional era in which the Supreme Court gave its imprimatur to the nonsensical ruling in NFIB v. Sebelius, the vile pro-Obamacare decision that has been aptly compared to an infamous slavery-reinforcing ruling that helped to precipitate civil war, it remains to be seen what, if any, other limits to governmental power the Court will see fit to recognize. Ben Shapiro correctly characterized the tortuously reasoned Obamacare decision as “the greatest single judicial limitation on American liberty since Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), in which the Supreme Court ruled that under the Constitution, blacks were not human beings.”
The lawsuit disposed of yesterday was brought by Noel Canning of Washington state, the owner of a soft drink bottling and distribution company who was displeased by a ruling the board made against him after its quorum was restored by the purported recess appointments. The NLRB found that Canning’s firm engaged in unfair labor practices by declining to sign a collective bargaining agreement. Canning argued the board had no legal authority to render the decision because the president’s recess appointments, made when the U.S. Senate did not consider itself to be in recess, were improper.
