Lately I've heard a lot of Republicans complaining about of Barrack Obama's recess appointments. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term, a recess appointment is a process by which a president can appoint judges and cabinet secretaries while the senate is not in session. You see, normally the senate has to confirm all of these positions. Sometimes those confirmations come easily, but often the opposing party will delay them indefinitely to make a political point or stick it to their adversaries. For that reason, presidents often take the opportunity of a recess to slip some minor position hires through and speed up the process. This has all happened before and it will all happen again. But this time, while the senate was on a 20-day recess, they had some "pro forma" sessions where one or two members would show up for five minutes and bang a gavel before dismissing themselves. So Obama went ahead and made his appointments because there was clearly no way they could vote on his nominees with literally one or two senators holding court for a matter of minutes. Predictably, as soon as the president made the appointments, Republicans began crying foul and accusing him of circumventing the system and disobeying the constitution. But again, this is normal. Presidents make recess appointments all the time. The law was put into place for this very reason. And what's just as normal? The opposition party finding a technicality and feigning outrage to score cheap political points. I know I've picked on the Republicans up until now, but it's really just a symptom of a larger problem. Every time (and I do mean every) that a politician uses one of these weird rules of law to get around the usual process, no matter how many times it's happened, and no matter how recently the politicians who are complaining have done the same exact thing, both Republicans and Democrats pitch a fit. "Well sure...we filibustered for 62 hours straight the last time we were the minority party, but this guy...he filibustered for 70 hours! It's a travesty of justice!" "I'm aware that the last democratic governor of the stage pardoned 137 people, but this republican governor pardoned 225. And it was on his second to last day in office instead of a week before he left. Book me on Meet the Press to complain immediately!"
You get my point, right? If you don't like all the weird little quirks of politics, then change them. But don't use them to your advantage and then get all up in arms when your opponents use those same rules six months later. Seriously. Stop the Chicken Little sky is falling routine. Few things annoy me as much as fake outrage.
