While senate Republicans--John Cornyn chief among them-- continue to bitch and moan about President Obama’s recess appointments last month, it is perhaps instructive to consider the words of a mystery speaker (to be revealed below) with an alternate view.
With respect to one nominee:
Frankly, opponents have only themselves to blame. They've prevented an up-or-down vote and the president exercised a constitutional option to end an unconstitutional filibuster against a nominee with bipartisan, majority support.
With respect to another, a similar comment:
This is a constitutional response to an unconstitutional filibuster. [The nominee] is a good man who had the support of a bipartisan majority of the Senate and was refused an up-or-down vote.
So who is this mystery speaker, who is so offended by the idea of not giving a well-respected Presidential nominee an up-or-down vote? None other than perennial bitcher-and-moaner-in-chief John Cornyn himself. But how can this be? Easy: The first quote was after the recess appointment, in January, 2004, of Mississippi Judge Charles W. Pickering to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The second followed the February, 2004 recess appointment of Alabama Attorney General William H. Pryor to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
At the time, Democrats criticized the appointments for having occurred during unusually short recesses (not to mention the odiousness of the nominees themselves.) Now that a Democrat is in the White House, Republicans in the Senate have dreamed up some new shenanigans: holding pro forma sessions of no more than a few minutes when Congress is functionally in recess, just to block the President from making an appointment. No matter that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council has upheld the constitutionality of Obama’s recent appointments: forty Republican senators, with Cornyn at the helm, have signed a statement declaring the appointments to be “unprecedented and unconstitutional.”
Cornyn may wish to revisit his own message to Democrats from 2004:
A change of heart is not surprising, though. In fact, it's become a pattern. During the Clinton Bush administration, Democrats Republicans condemned… filibusters [of nominees], but now support them. During the Clinton Bush administration, recess appointments were just fine. Now, they're unconstitutional.
[Note: the Cornyn quotes appeared in Washington Times articles from January 17, February 21, and March 10, 2004.]