By Rand Paul
Obama acts as though we no longer have a Constitution
A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that President Obama violated the Constitution when he made a recess appointment to the National Labor Relations Board, marking the second panel to rebuke the administration and making the issue even more likely to draw Supreme Court scrutiny.
The impish lexicographer Ambrose Bierce defined a lawyer as someone "skilled in the circumvention of the law." By that reckoning, the lawyers at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) are among the most experienced lawyers in town.
While the Senate's Democratic rulers will ignore a Republican bill passed by the House last week aimed at conditionally shuttering the National Labor Relations Board, the upper chamber's GOP minority is determined to keep the panel in limbo until a dispute over President Obama's "recess appointments" is resolved.
President Obama made waves Tuesday by nominating three candidates to the National Labor Relations Board, even as the board's authority is being questioned by the courts and Republicans plot to shut it down.
The Republican-led House will take up a measure this week that would conditionally shut down the National Labor Relations Board in a move aimed at stopping President Obama from tilting the panel too far to the political left.
President Obama's record on nominating federal judges lags behind those of his predecessors, and nowhere is his failure more glaring than on the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
A massive embezzlement case in Mexico involving the leader of Latin America’s largest labor union should send shivers up and down the spines of American workers. It should also force the administration of Barack Obama to reexamine its ongoing kowtowing to union bosses – most notably the continued erosion of worker safeguards against union corruption.
If it's true that art imitates life (and sometimes it seems so), the National Labor Relations Board has become the bureaucratic equivalent of the television hit "The Walking Dead."
President Obama will elevate the controversy over his recess appointment powers to the highest level, with the National Labor Relations Board announcing Tuesday it will appeal to the Supreme Court a lower-court ruling that held his appointments to the board were illegal.
Job creators today are finding it difficult to make important decisions about their businesses, growth opportunities and investments. A federal court recently gave hope to beleaguered small-business owners by ruling President Obama's January 2012 appointments to the National Labor Relations Board were unconstitutional.
President Obama is riding a pretty long, unbroken streak of policy victories that is scheduled to come to an end this week. The $85 billion sequester that will reduce spending by a scant 2.4 percent marks the first serious misstep by a president who is overseeing the largest expansion of federal government intervention in the economy in two generations. Mr. Obama has either expanded federal control or protected hard-fought gains during his time in office. He hasn’t gotten everything he wanted, to be sure, but this looks like his first step backward.
Any consumer of politics and policy debates in the nation's capital will recall the countless times President Obama has called on those serving in Congress to set aside pettiness and partisanship and take steps to deliver real reforms benefitting the American people.
President Obama on Wednesday renominated two Democratic members of the National Labor Relations Board whose recess appointments were ruled unconstitutional — the same day House Republicans moved to temporarily shut down the agency.
President Obama is not backing down from his unlawful installation of officials at the National Labor Relations Board. Despite being told by a federal appellate court that it was unconstitutional to make a recess appointment when the Senate was still in session, the administration is standing by purported appointee Richard Griffin.
On Jan. 20, Barack Obama took the presidential Oath of Office, swearing once again to uphold and defend the Constitution.
