Recess Appointments and the Future of Executive Power

In January 2012, President Obama during a recess of Congress filled several vacancies on the five-member National Labor Relations Board. Those vacancies were challenged as unconstitutional by a firm, Noel Canning, with disputes before the NLRB. Two of the nation’s leading scholars in law and political science—Professor David Strauss, a distinguished law professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a member of the ACS Board of Directors, and Norman Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute—provided analysis of the case, NLRB v. Noel Canning, before the high court heard oral argument on January 13.