Apparently, “respecting the U.S. Constitution” didn’t make it onto President Obama’s 2012 New Year’s resolution list, as evidenced by his “recess” appointment of anti-business extremist Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Just an few hours later, Obama made three additional appointments to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which has become little more than a Big Labor battering ram under this president.

Obama is terming his appointments “recess” appointments. They are nothing of the sort, because Congress is not in recess. Article I, Section 5, Clause 4 of the U.S. Constitution provides that “Neither House, during the Session of Congress, shall, without the Consent of the other, adjourn for more than three days …” To prevent any recess appointment, the Republican-controlled House has refused to consent to Senate adjournment, resulting in the Senate coming into pro forma session every three days. But as Ed Meese, who served as Attorney General under Ronald Reagan, points out: these pro forma sessions aren’t gimmicks. The two-month extension of the payroll tax holiday was approved during a pro forma Senate session.

But in an unprecedented power grab, Obama has decided that he can decide when Congress is or is not in session. Meese rightly calls it a “constitutional abuse of a high order.” If this abuse stands, the U.S. Senate’s constitutional role to advise and consent in the confirmation of key executive appointees, already undermined by Obama’s many czar appointments, could become moot. (more…)

So now it seems the executive branch of our government thinks it rules over the legislative branch. King Obama can now (regardless of what the Constitution says) tell congress that they are officially in recess, so he can appoint the people he wants, without those pesky confirmation votes.

As a start, read more background information HERE and HERE.

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How do unelected Obama appointed NLRB board members bring about Card Check and bypass congress and secret ballot elections? On Thursday July 7th as the House Education & Workforce Committee was trying to get to the bottom of the NLRB actions in a Capitol Hill Hearing, the National Right To Work was busy giving the answers to congress.

Enclosed in the book The Devil At My Doorstep, a first-hand account written by Dave Bego of the extremes Big Labor is willing to go to avoid having a secret ballot election, was a letter briefly explaining the NLRB’s steps toward implementing Card Check through regulations and other NLRB activity (click image to read letter).

On Thursday, The National Right To Work Committee distributed the book to members of congress to provide them the opportunity to read about the turmoil that card check corporate campaigns have on the lives of individual employees, their families, and communities.

In the hearing on Thursday, Larry Getts, a former union steward, who lived through a community dividing UAW campaign, was prepared to answer any questions regarding the anguish individual workers, their families, and his community suffered.

But, Democrat members refused to actually ask a real employee about what happens or how he felt about the NLRB’s actions. Outrageously, one congressman spent his five minutes reminiscing about the wonderful 1930’s and the Wagner Act that created the NLRB and federally sanctioned forced unionism.

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Obama Medicare Head Bringing UK Rationing Board to US?

Medicare Head Donald Berwick will testify in front of the Senate Finance Committee Wednesday for the first time since President Obama used a recess appointment to put him into place. He’ll be facing down a host of Republicans who objected to his nomination on the grounds that he’s in love with wealth redistribution and Britains National Health Service.

Sens. Pat Roberts (Kan.), Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and John Barrasso (Wyo.) joined forces on the Senate floor shortly after the last vote of the day and urged members to review Berwick’s record before voting on his confirmation. They accused Berwick of promoting health care rationing, especially for older people, and particularly criticized his endorsement of Great Britain’s National Healthcare System (NHS). “Dr. Berwick is a huge fan of … the NHS, a system that relies on rationing health care to hold down costs,” Roberts said. “Dr. Berwick has said, ‘I am a romantic about the NHS; I love it,’ and ‘the NHS is not just a national treasure, it is a global treasure.’”

In case Americans are unaware, the NHS has a terrifyingly active healthcare rationing panel. Originally put in place to reduce healthcare costs, root out bad doctors and useless treatments and ensure that healthcare practices were at their absolute best. Over time, NICE has taken to “reducing costs”by limiting the kinds of treatments British patients are allowed to receive through government healthcare. The Wall Street Journal warned Americans last July about NICE and cost-cutting panels. They cited NICE’s rulings against providing lifesaving breast and stomach cancer drugs, blocking or restricting access to drugs to treat macular degeneration, kidney disease, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis and myloma, and NICE’s restrictions on fertility treatments, certain surgical procedures and cervical cancer screenings, all in the name of saving money.

One of the questions Berwick will face will likely be on the subject of IPAB – the Independent Payment Advisory Board – a panel made up of fifteen unelected bureaucrats who will be charged with making drastic cuts to medicare on a yearly basis, likely limiting patient choice for Medicare recipients. The panel’s decisions are unappealable and can only be overturned by a supermajority vote in Congress. Berwick will have to explain how IPAB – termed by Sen. Tom Coburn as a “a government command-and-control bureaucracy that will dictate payment decisions and interfere with the best judgment of physicians and families” – is necessary and beneficial to Medicare patients.

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Dr. Donald Berwick, a leading proponent of rationing of medical care in the United States and a supporter of the British health care system, is prepared to testify before Congress for the first time since he recess appointment to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicare Services.

Republicans have a constitutional obligation to get Berwick’s views on the record and appear ready to do so.  Politico reports that Republicans will focus their questioning on five areas including his professed “love” of the British government-run health care system.  Berwick has called the National Health Service – with its rationing of treatment and care – as “one of the greatest health care institutions in human history” and “a global treasure,” once saying that it set an “example” for the United States to follow.

Berwick’s support for rationing lead President Obama to bypass the Senate confirmation process to appoint Berwick to his post.

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Now that the election is over and we’ve seen in stark light the rebuke that Obama has received, many are wondering if he’ll moderate his far left agenda. But a few movements in the Labor Dept. will disabuse anyone of the notion that Obama intends to drop his left-wing agenda.

Leave it to an Obama appointee to the National Labor Rights Board (NLRB) to want to push votes to install unions in the workplace on an accelerated schedule. I guess all the payoffs and special favors that Obama and his cohorts have given to labor unions in these two of the longest years any president ever had have not been enough.

On Oct. 21, NLRB Member Mark Gaston Pearce said that the time period between filing and the holding of elections for new union representation in a company should be “as brief as possible.”

Of course, this shortened election period is nothing but a sop to Big Labor and intended to hurt businesses that might try to put up a fight against the encroachment of unions.

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One of the chief responsibilities of the Congress is the provide oversight of the executive branch — a responsibility that the Democrat Congress has punted. The president nominated Donald Berwick to head the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid, a proponent of rationing for the poor and elderly. Not only did the Congress not hold a single hearing about Berwick’s support for a government-run health care system, they never voted on his nomination. Berwick now heads an agency bigger than the Department of Defense without so much as a question being asked about his qualifications and extreme views.

Berkwick’s support for the imposition of a British-style health care system complete with its rationing regime is clear. “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care–the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open,” Berwick said in a June 2009 interview with Biotechnology Healthcare.

In an interview last June, Dr. Berwick said, “NICE is extremely effective and a conscientious, valuable, and — importantly — knowledge-building system.” He added that NICE has “developed very good and very disciplined, scientifically grounded, policy-connected models for the evaluation of medical treatments from which we ought to learn.” Moments later, the interviewer asked, “So you are saying that the federal CER [Comparative Effectiveness Research] agency should get involved in cost determinations?” Berwick replied, “You can say, ‘Well, we shouldn’t even look.’ But that would be irrational. The social budget is limited.” NICE is the government agency in Britain that rations care on a daily basis. Professor Mike Rawlins, the chairman the British National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) who said: “The question is not whether care is rationed but how.”

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On this week’s Health Care News podcast, Avik Roy, one of the most insightful writers about health care policy today, took the time to discuss with me the White House’s decision to bypass the nomination process of the U.S. Senate to recess appoint Donald Berwick as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Listen to it here:

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People have asked me this week why this recess appointment is such a bad thing. Well, this video clip shows why, in an honest expression of the anti-market views Berwick holds from the man himself. Here’s what he says:

“Please don’t put your faith in market forces. It’s a popular idea that Adam Smith’s invisible hand would do a better job of designing care than leaders with plans can. I do not agree. I find little evidence anywhere that market forces, bluntly used, that is, consumer choice among an array of products with competitors’ fighting it out, leads to the health care system you want and need.”

These two paths run in opposite directions: the path toward market based solutions, where people direct their own care with their doctors, making decisions for themselves, and the path toward bureaucracy based solutions, where unelected experts — “leaders with plans” — determine people’s care, making decisions for them. Berwick is clear about which path he believes America must follow.
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Card check is dead, right? Wrong.

This weekend the president named a key SEIU lawyer to the quiet but crucial National Labor Relations Board through a controversial recess appointment.

By doing so, the president has gone well outside the norm of history by failing to appoint a Republican and Democrat at the same time. Some worry he is trying to stack the deck to make sure government can — as they have said in their own words — “change the rules governing forming a union through administrative action” even without passing a card check bill.

TheTruthAboutEFCA.com tracked down an expert who is a previous NLRB member, and he said:

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