After about two years of this, President Obama responded by making appointments to the Consumer Fraud Protection Bureau and National Labor Relations Board that Republicans had been blocking, and that’s when the legal battle began. When Barack Obama became President, though, Republicans remembered what their predecessors had done and used the filibuster and other means to block Presidential appointments. While Republicans threatened at the time to change filibuster rules to allow nominations to go forward, that never happened. During the Bush Administration, for example, President Bush used the Recess Appointment power to name John Bolton as United Nations Ambassador when Democrats used legislative procedures to block his appointment. Notwithstanding the fact that the rational for the Recess Appointments power has long ago faded away, it has remained in the Constitution and has increasingly become a point of contention between the President and Congress, especially when the two branches are controlled by different parties. Thanks to air, auto, and rail transportation, Congress is rarely out of session more than a couple weeks or a month, and can easily be called back to Washington on short notice. For a long period of time, this provision made sense given the fact that Congress only met for brief periods of time and there were gaps that would last months or longer during which the Senate would not be in session, but that fact has become less and less common in the modern era. At the same time, though, the Constitution does provide another method for appointment that allows the President to make appointments when Congress is not in session, with the provision that the appointment would only last until the end of the then-current session of Congress unless the Senate confirms the appointee. For the most part, this is how the vast majority of Federal appointees have obtained their position since the beginning of the Republic. In most cases, the Constitution requires that all appointments to Federal Agencies, Cabinet Departments, and of course the Judiciary be made by the President and approved by the Senate by a majority vote.
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