Opinion ID: 76762
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Purpose of the Recess Appointment Power

Text: 35 Determining whether the President can fill a vacancy that did not occur while the Senate was in recess still leaves open the question of when the President can make a recess appointment itself. Contrary to what the majority holds, the Constitution certainly does not endorse the conclusion that the President can fill a vacancy that happens during one recess by making an appointment during a subsequent recess. Where a constitutional provision is unclear or silent on a particular issue, we must look to the spirit and purpose of the provision for guidance. See Baker by Thomas v. General Motors Corp., 522 U.S. 222, 232, 118 S.Ct. 657, 139 L.Ed.2d 580 (1998) (finding that the animating purpose of the Full Faith and Credit Clause was to alter the status of the several states as independent foreign sovereignties and make them integral parts of a single nation) (internal citation omitted); Katz v. United States, 389 U.S. 347, 350-51, 359, 88 S.Ct. 507, 19 L.Ed.2d 576 (1967) (finding that one of the purposes of the Fourth Amendment is to protect the public's reasonable expectations of privacy, and holding that the admission of evidence obtained by an electronic wiretap without a warrant is unconstitutional); Green v. U.S., 355 U.S. 184, 187, 78 S.Ct. 221, 2 L.Ed.2d 199 (1957) (emphasizing that the Double Jeopardy Clause of the Fifth Amendment was designed to protect an individual from being subjected to the hazards of trial and possible conviction more than once for an alleged offense). 36 At the time of the founding, the purpose of the Recess Appointments Clause was to enable the President to fill vacancies that arose when the Senate is disabled from acting upon appointments. The Framers' only known discussion of the Recess Appointments Clause is The Federalist No. 67, by Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton wrote: 37 The relation in which [the recess appointments] clause stands to the [advice-and-consent clause], which declares the general mode of appointing officers of the United States, denotes it to be nothing more than a supplement to the other, for the purpose of establishing an auxiliary method of appointment, in cases to which the general method was inadequate. The ordinary power of appointment is confined to the President and Senate jointly, and can therefore only be exercised during the session of the Senate; but as it would have been improper to oblige this body to be continually in session for the appointment of officers and as vacancies might happen in their recess, which it might be necessary for the public service to fill without delay, the succeeding clause is evidently intended to authorize the President, singly, to make temporary appointments during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session. 38 The Federalist No. 67, at 391 (Isaac Kramnick ed., 1987) (emphasis in the original). 6 Thus, Hamilton argues, the Framers added the Recess Appointments Clause to the Constitution in order to ensure that the President would be able to fill offices when the Senate was unable to act on the President's nominees. Nowhere does Hamilton suggest that the clause was added to allow the President to appoint someone whom the Senate might refuse to confirm. 39 The leading early nineteenth-century constitutional treatise, Joseph Story's Commentaries on the Constitution, reinforces this description of the purpose of the Recess Appointments Clause. Story notes that the recess appointment power was designed to avoid requiring the Senate to be perpetually in session, in order to provide for the appointment of officers. As such, Story wrote, the clause was meant simply to further the interests of convenience, promptitude of action, and general security. 7 40 Without quite admitting the point in full, the majority correctly acknowledges that allowing the President to fill up vacancies in federal offices while the Senate is disabled from acting on presidential nominations is the purpose of the recess appointment power. See Order at 1224 (We accept that it was the intent of the Framers to keep important offices filled and government functioning.); id. at 1226 ([T]he main purpose of the Recess Appointments Clause [is] to enable the President to fill vacancies to assure the proper functioning of our government.). But the majority's reading of the scope of the recess appointment power is far broader than this justification allows. This is because the majority's holding gives a President the power to repeatedly circumvent the Senate's advice-and-consent role even when the Senate is not disabled from exercising that role but is, instead, perfectly capable of exercising it. 41 Under the majority's reading, if the Senate refuses to give its consent to a particular nominee during a particular session, there is nothing to stop a President from waiting not just until the immediately ensuing recess, but also until after the Senate has repeatedly reconvened and recessed before appointing that person through the recess appointment power. There is absolutely no reason why the Senate would not be able to exercise its advice-and-consent role over this long span of time, and yet the majority's interpretation gives a President the ability to appoint someone without regard to whether the Senate has in fact been available to consider that nominee. All that a President need worry about, under such a view, is (1) whether the Senate is in town and (2) whether there is a vacancy in a federal office. 42 This example suffices to show that the majority's explanation of the justification of the Recess Appointments Clause—to allow a President to fill vacancies when the Senate cannot act to confirm nominees— bears little or no relation to its reading of the scope of a President's recess appointment power. For this reading makes no attempt to limit the use of the recess appointment power to those circumstances in which the Senate is in fact disabled from acting on presidential nominations, even though this is the only conceivable (and indeed the only historical) justification for the recess appointment power. As Hamilton emphasized in The Federalist No. 67, the recess appointment power is nothing more than a supplement or auxiliary to the ordinary and general mode of appointing officers of the United States, which is  jointly,  by way of the Senate's advice and consent. The Federalist No. 67, at 391 (Isaac Kramnick ed., 1987) (emphasis in the original). The majority's decision, however, entails that a President can fill a vacancy at any point in the future when the Senate is not in session. This cannot be correct. 43