1115.org

(1)
On Sunday, U.S. News and World Report put out a story about Harry Reid’s masterful plan to thwart Bush with respect to any sneaky recess appointments the President may have planned for the summer:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has a little trick up his sleeve that could spell an end to President Bush’s devilish recess appointments of controversial figures like former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton. We hear that over the long August vacation, when those types of summer hires are made, Reid will call the Senate into session just long enough to force the prez to send his nominees who need confirmation to the chamber. The talk is he will hold a quickie “pro forma” session every 10 days, tapping a local senator to run the hall. Senate workers and Republicans are miffed, but Reid is proving that he’s the new sheriff in town.

This story was picked up by all the usual suspects, and received much play.

We, of course, didn’t pick it up. Because it didn’t make any damn sense to us. We happened to remember that Bush appointed Sam Fox as Ambassador to Belgium during the week-long spring break recess.

Naturally, the question in our minds was: how is breaking up the summer recess into a series of 10-day recesses going to achieve anything, if recess appointments can be made during a week-long recess?

On Monday, we posted that as a question at The Carpetbagger Report. Reader beep52 came through with this gem from a Congressional Research Service report (pdf) titled “Recess Appointments: Frequently Asked Questions”:

The Constitution does not specify the length of time that the Senate must be in recess before the President may make a recess appointment. Over the last century, as shorter recesses have become more commonplace, Attorneys General and the Office of Legal Counsel have offered differing views on this issue. Most recently, in 1993, a Department of Justice brief implied that the President may make a recess appointment during a recess of more than three days.

So apparently Harry Reid’s so-called plan is toothless. Imagine that!

(2)
The U.S. News and World Report story was written by Paul Bedard. Striking how he invoked “President Bush’s devilish recess appointments of controversial figures like former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton”. Wouldn’t it have been far more natural to cite the most recent controversial appointment, that of Sam Fox? Somehow Bedard didn’t cite that. I really wonder why.