sorry but article ii section 3 does not say that the president can force congress to adjourn *when it does not want to* and spreading that message is doing trump’s work for him
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It's also not like this slipped through without the drafters thinking about it. The power of the King to dissolve/prorogue/adjourn Parliament was hotly contested in English history and the royal governors' dissolutions of the colonial assemblies was prominent in the leadup to the Revolution.
That was fast. :) I see “recess appointments”; I’ve heard a rumor that Trump would adjourn Congress and then recess-appoint his Cabinet. If he can get away with that, we are lost.
We need our government leaders to be cunning and shrewd. We as a people must be prepared to fight with wisdom.
Trump will never play by the rules because he believes there are no rules. Congress must not let one convicted felon destroy a nation that has stood for centuries.
It always seemed to me a strangely vague and open-ended provision. If they can’t agree how long to adjourn for, the President could adjourn them…forever? It seems predicated on the notion that since the President needs Congress to fund the government, he would use this power reasonably.
Jamelle,
Present company excluded, the media needs to be very clear and direct. It must not act as though there is a “normal runway” to any of the things that Trump does. They did this in his first Presidency, and even with his very legitimacy as a candidate in the first place.
While all things election 2024 are debatable, saying that everything is equally horrible by Trump than nothing really sticks with the majority of not politically active online
Of course that’s right. The hypothetical problem is that it just requires a contrived adjournment issue that Johnson goes with and then Senate rules can be manipulated to create a conflict that Trump can then use. He cannot do this unilaterally but there are schemes that could theoretically work.
Exactly. Johnson is the key here, and I'm assuming this, or something like it, was part of the widely reported "secret" they were talking about a few weeks ago.
What happens in that situation is that we will see what the US military does in response to a second autogolpe attempt by Trump. The first time, they immediately accepted the authority of Nancy Pelosi to give them orders.
I swear people have the absolute weirdest notions about how government stuff works and I mean it's not like the Schoolhouse Rock people didn't cover separate and coequal branches, it was a good song! I don't know if there's one for "this job is not like prime minister", though.
My question is whether, legally speaking, a Senate that is "adjourned" is the same thing as a Senate that is "in recess." It probably is, but I'm not a lawyer, Constitutional scholar, etc. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it's never been tested.
He can only adjourn a session he convened himself. But your point still stands, the Republicans will probably agree to adjourn for him. Susan Collins will be concerned about it though.
They're smart, and they're dooming, therefore anyone not dooming must not be as smart as they are and must be Told. The internet would be a vastly quieter place if people could resist the temptation to try and outclever each other.
(Yes, I'm here too. I am aware of my hypocrisies.)
I'm sympathetic to anyone who's fallen into despair. I get it. I'm not happy either, and things are gonna get really bad! But treating Trump and his phalanx of dipshits and thieves as invulnerable supervillains makes it harder to stand against them or recognize an advantage when one appears.
“Disagreement as to the time of adjournment” is not the same as “disagreement as to whether to adjourn”. Extremely clear on the face of it, but of course it would come down to *this* Supreme Court to determine.
Yes, that's a hypothetical that's been raised. Johnson puts the House into a ten-day recess, which requires Senate approval, and if Thune doesn't agree, that's a "disagreement" that Trump could use to force an adjournment. But it may not matter because I expect Thune to just roll over.
If we’ve learned anything in the last 6 years, it’s that the SC is willing to “originalist” anything in the Constitution to mean whatever they need it to mean. There are no “key phrases”anymore. Willful misreading is the M.O.
Yep. He needs the approval of at least one chamber. He needs virtually all republicans to give up everything that makes them special to achieve this. Will Collins and Murkowski agree?
People seem to have a very sanguine opinion of literally every president in history before Trump if they think there was One Weird Trick just lying around that they all voluntarily chose not to use when Congress was being intransigent
Well, Nixon tried to say "If the president does it, it's not a crime" so for him the reverse would be actually true. If the president doesn't do it, it probably doesn't exist.
Before Trump, I didn’t pay that much attention to politics,& I used 2 think what difference does a US President really make….That belief has been crushed with Trump 1 & more w/Trump 2.0. I don’t think I’ll live long enough to see those days of boring normality again in politics. Really f*cking sad.
According to the plain meaning of the Constitution this *does* mean that the President and the House of Representatives *together* could force the Senate to recess
Most importantly- he has no clue what any of this means and neither does Stephen Miller. If he tries anything like this straight off even his poodles on SCOTUS are going to shut it right down and say to themselves wtf?
Yes, it's only when the two house DISAGREE, specifically about when to adjourn. This is simple stuff, but that literacy report posted earlier makes sense.
You are right about Article II, however in case no one noticed; every day of the coming Trump Administration will be Extraordinary Circumstances.
And…
Anybody that thinks he won’t resort to the most extraordinary measures never before imagined, in order to get his way, hasn’t been paying attention.
I mean we kinda already did. The minority of us chose the light, the rest chose something else (including being okay with anything else). Unless you're talking about some other sort of deciding.
If he has one chamber backing him, Scalia (with Roberts, Thomas, and Alito) suggested in Noel Canning that POTUS does have the power to adjourn both houses.
Ultimately it's vague language that has never been tested, meaning SCOTUS would get the final say. And after the immunity decision, I don't have a lot of hope that they'd constrain Trump.
Right, but isn't the idea that the House and Senate will contrive a "disagreement with respect to the time of adjournment" and then Trump would use the president's power in that clause to adjourn them to 10-15 days from now to trigger his ability to make recess appointments and then make them? 1/
So not some permanent proroguement but rather a way to force a recess without any Republicans in Congress having to get their hands dirty voting for a recess. 2/2
The GOP doesn't want to say no to trump but they also don't want their names on all of these obscene nominations. Their escape path to birth is to allow recess appointments. #doomsday
Thune’s win adds credence to the idea that Trump will be placated but not obeyed.
The egos in the Senate are too enormous to allow for a complete nullification of their advise/consent role. I think some kind of noxious compromise will happen that will stave off the worst of the worst- for now
The supreme court ruled that recess appointments are not allowed when senate is in a pro forma session. Can't the Dem senators keep the senate open in pro forma sessions?
Trump is also a lame duck and Republicans should rightfully fear him less than they did two weeks ago. Trump probably cost them at least four senate seats.
Yeah seems like a distinction without a difference in 2024, where almost the entire GOP is either in thrall to Trump or terrified of his mob of zealots.
I mean, I hope you’re right and some of them will not go along. I hope.
To me, this is the more concerning option. I am happy to be wrong, but my understanding of the Clause is that nothing but political will can stop the House and Senate from manufacturing a disagreement about the time to adjourn, and I am skeptical about that political will.
Seems like this is the risk. Not that they’d do it against their will but that he’d wave his magic wand and they’d be like “yeah let’s just play along so he doesn’t get mad”
I think maybe the disconnect here is that the distinction between what Trump wants and what the GOP will give him to avoid being attacked by his rabid mob is increasingly narrow, making "he can't actually do that unilaterally" increasingly pedantic.
Keep in mind, Senate Republicans letting Trump jerk them around like that are ceding power to Trump. And Senators don't willingly cede power, normally.
But if he says congress is adjourned and now all of these people are appointed, how is he stopped? Will the Senate do anything? Will SCOTUS? What happens during the time we're waiting for a decision?
Seems likely to me that he would get away with the recess appointments.
Isn’t the argument for it that it’s crossing over into autogolpe territory and the power is the hard power of the state backed by the SC. I don’t know how to assess the risk of them going maximalist on that stuff day 1, but think it’s low but non-zero.
It's should also be pointed out that this theory floating around also comes from the same whackjob who tried to discredit Brett Kavanaugh's accuser with a Zillow map. So take the gossip with a grain of salt.
Same way Sen. Tubberville says "POTUS & VP will be running the senate" means nothing. I think John Thune might have some differing opinions about that, the actual incoming senate majority leader with the actual power.
Yes, but the plan is getting Johnson to get his razor-thin caucus to agree to ask the Senate for two weeks adjournment (which is a huge stretch, granted).
Either the Senate agrees and Trump gets his recess appointments, or the Senate disagrees and Trump adjourns them and starts appointing them.
OP's point is POTUS can't adjourn the Senate, except when the Senate is in an extraordinary session called by POTUS, which will not be the case. That's just the plain language of the sentence in the Constitution.
GOP Senate will confirm all or nearly all the nominees, anyway.
"Extraordinary session only" was not seen by Scalia, Roberts, Thomas, and Alito in the Noel Canning concurrence. Three of those mooks still sit on the Court with three other mooks to back them up.
LOL, that case had nothing to do with adjourning. But go ahead and fantasize and needlessly flame fears. IANAL, but I know he needs the Senate (or at least 50 Senators) to function and cooperate with him else he won't have any money to spend and won't be able to change laws he wants to change.
Regardless, it makes no sense as a tactic. None of these nominees are important. Plenty of flunkies to replace whichever don't make it. He's testing the Senate to see how much they'll swallow. He's preparing worse courses for them. Makes no sense to risk SCOTUS undoing months of administration.
Or the Senate just says recess over and goes back to work and forces the House to keep doing this. You need a long enough recess for a recess appointment and if the Senate doesn't want to recess for that long, there is no mechanism that forces them
If the House and Senate cannot agree on adjournment, the Constitution gives the President the power to decide when they both come back in this instance, "to such Time as he shall think proper."
He’s got both sides of the legislative branch in the bag. Gotta figure they want to at this stage. Surely that was a condition of wanting to appoint Thune.
We already know that Trump doesn’t follow the constitution or any other rules. He signed the law that requires paperwork to be filed for the Transition and he hasn’t filed that paperwork. He flouts the rules and interferes in congress all the time. If he wants them on recess, Leadership will do it.
Idk man. He has a Supreme Court that has given him complete legal immunity, and Republicans only believe in the constitution when it can be weaponized against brown people/women. Chips on the table, do you *really* think they wouldn’t do this?
Legal immunity does not create new powers. Saying, "You won't be prosecuted if you try to hold up a bank" does not mean a bank has to obey you when you walk in and say, "Give me all the money."
They’re not trying to Still Be Congress or Still Have A Functional Democracy or anything remotely like that. Legal immunity means he, the chief executive, can have the legislature arrested and removed from office when they don’t adjourn at his whim.
I feel like you’re operating on a different assumption from the get-go. What they want, what republicans want, is to set up a permanent monarchy/autocracy with a sham legislature. They’re literally just waiting for an excuse to step out of the way and cede powers to their boss.
Sorry, this is stupid. Look at literally any Republican Senator or House member--they are just as craven and power-hungry as Trump; they are absolutely not hatching a plan to give their own power.
We're only talking about recess appointments at all *because Republican members of Congress have objections to his Cabinet picks.* That's the context! That Congress is NOT in lock-step!
What part of "we don't have to cede everything to him by default" are you missing here?
Absolutely, the Republicans could blow everything up and let him steamroll everything. But we don't have to assume that in advance, and we shouldn't. We should go down yelling the whole time.
??? Republicans will let him do this. They WANT him to do this. It’s not a matter of what the constitution says a president can or cannot do. They want to enact a monarchy and they’ll do whatever they can to make it happen.
This is still not responsive to his comment, which was about not assisting to normalize their bad behavior, not whether they will engage in the behavior.
While recent years have been somewhat different Congress does not have a long and storied history of bending over backwards to accommodate the whims of the executive branch
I don’t know. I give him a 90% chance of pissing too many of them off before the Inauguration. I mean, they want the clout but a lot may not be in for pure sycophancy. Hmm can you use that word that way?
In demanding recess appointments for administration officials AND JUDGES, he's stripping Congress of one of its key roles. I can't imagine they'll all roll over for belly rubs.
he does have the power to intervene when House and Senate disagree about adjournment, so in theory if he got House to adjourn without Senate agreeing he might then force Senate to recess enabling him to do recess appointments, but even that has not been tested up the Court system
It's good to remember that the founders considered Congress to be the strongest branch because they made the laws. The executive was just there to enforce them. That's why Congress is Article I.
It wouldn't have occurred to them that the executive could tell them how to do their job.
he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper;
Keywords here being "may on extraordinary occasions."
Article 1, §5
"Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting."
If one House wants to adjourn for a week and the other doesn't, President resolves it.
So I guess if the GOP Senate wants to fall on its sword for him, they can say "let's adjourn for the whole year" and then Trump can approve it, but I don't think the Senators want to go very long without self-dealing and insider trading
Yes. It's checkmate. Either Thune goes along with whatever Johnson and Trump have worked out in advance, or Trump dissolves Congress. There's no other move.
Thank you. My reading is that the viral post is incorrect because the House and Senate Rules clearly state that an Adjournment is to be distinguished from a Recess. Under Art II Sec 2, “Vacancies may be filled” only during a “Recess of the Senate.” In contrast, Art II Sec 3 deals only w/Adjournment
Y'all need to stop freaking out and join organizations that know how to fight this. Align with a policy position. AU, ACLU, Planned Parenthood, NEA, NAACP, SURJ, etc. lots of organizations on our side. Pick one and join.
If Republicans control the house, doesn't the speaker have the power to call for Congress to adjourn (if the speaker wanted to)? Or does their need to some sort of a vote?
But what happens if he does it anyway? If he claims Congress is adjourned and appoints this cavalcade of clowns what will be the response? If he holds all the levers of enforcement who/what stops him?
Didn't Obama try a couple of recess appointments when the Senate was on one of their many breaks and McConnell said they never officially adjourned and a court backed him up?
There was a point at which they kept Congress in session so Obama couldn't recess appoint Elizabeth Warren to the CFPB, and again when we were trying to get Merrick Garland through as a Supreme Court Justice. They wanted to prevent recess appointments.
Exactly, he makes a big flourishing claim and everything skitters around repeating it. Makes him seem powerful and gets him attention.
No one remembers 2 days later.
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The president simply does not have a general proroguement power under the Constitution. Federalist 69 addresses this.
Has any president ever even used the limited form prescribed by the text? I’m not sure they have
What's also true is that they've said they'd be willing to adjourn for him.
Trump will never play by the rules because he believes there are no rules. Congress must not let one convicted felon destroy a nation that has stood for centuries.
"in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper ..."
Present company excluded, the media needs to be very clear and direct. It must not act as though there is a “normal runway” to any of the things that Trump does. They did this in his first Presidency, and even with his very legitimacy as a candidate in the first place.
Almost like a filibuster?
(Yes, I'm here too. I am aware of my hypocrisies.)
*Crowd in unison* "hi CJ"
https://www.npr.org/2011/12/09/143458518/congress-wont-recess-to-block-obama-appointments
That’s the core of our Constitution
Public Money versus a currency that is controlled by King George is the revolution.
Our public discourse says our currency comes from tax paying Musk
King Musk
This is very "checks and balances" in the way the framers thought there would be less partisanship and more inter branch checks
And…
Anybody that thinks he won’t resort to the most extraordinary measures never before imagined, in order to get his way, hasn’t been paying attention.
That foolishness is what got us here.
People who still think the US Constitution can save America from this are part of the problem.
The Trump era needs to end with massive political reform.
Abolishing the electoral college for a start.
The egos in the Senate are too enormous to allow for a complete nullification of their advise/consent role. I think some kind of noxious compromise will happen that will stave off the worst of the worst- for now
If the point is to let Trump appoint a pedophile as AG, why not just approve him?
Would that even be sparing their own dignity?
Perhaps I'm too cynical right now, but given the recent GOP history of ethics as a matter of convenience, I think it's highly likely they go along.
Hearing now the House is being called for GOP. So, really, what's to stop them?
I mean, I hope you’re right and some of them will not go along. I hope.
What harm can it do to humor him?
Now, I'm 50/50.
This could mean "if we can't confirm, we'll recess." But it could mean "If *Dems* block, we'll recess--but *we* still get to advise & consent"...
Seems likely to me that he would get away with the recess appointments.
Media legitimized them—& *still* are.
Just this week, they refer to Wolf as “former DHS Sec”. BIG difference btwn legit former & *impersonator*!
We need a functioning fourth estate.
not saying this can't happen, just that that's a rather monumental thing to presuppose
It's possible, maybe probable, that the reason Trump and Musk lobbied so hard for Scott was because Scott would go along with something like this.
Thune, for all his faults, wants to keep his power. Scott is also REALLY unpopular with his colleagues.
Dan. 7:25
Either the Senate agrees and Trump gets his recess appointments, or the Senate disagrees and Trump adjourns them and starts appointing them.
GOP Senate will confirm all or nearly all the nominees, anyway.
"Members of the President’s party in Congress may be able to prevent the Senate from holding pro forma sessions with the necessary frequency..."
I think if Johnson can ask for two weeks and Thune says no, the Supreme Court would agree that Trump can shut it down and start appointing.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/573/513/#tab-opinion-1970975
Christopher Miller, Jeffrey Rosen, Chad Wolf, etc: none of them were confirmed by the Senate
Absolutely, the Republicans could blow everything up and let him steamroll everything. But we don't have to assume that in advance, and we shouldn't. We should go down yelling the whole time.
That was a big disregard of history
"Oh, you wanna impeach me? Too bad! Adjourned!"
It wouldn't have occurred to them that the executive could tell them how to do their job.
he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper;
Keywords here being "may on extraordinary occasions."
Problem solved.
"Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days, nor to any other Place than that in which the two Houses shall be sitting."
If one House wants to adjourn for a week and the other doesn't, President resolves it.
I mean, is this what he pictures Trump and Vance saying?
No one remembers 2 days later.