Noel Canning invalidates President Obama's recess appointments of three members of the National Labor Relations Board. Under the "recess appointments" clause of the Constitution, Article II § 2 cl. 3, "[t]he President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next Session."



Obama had made his appointments during a period when the Senate -- because of a tricky maneuver by the Republican House -- was blocked from taking a full recess, but instead was holding one-minute, one-member "pro forma" sessions every three days at which no business was or could be conducted. This was the equivalent of a recess, Obama's lawyers reasoned, and so the clause permitted him to make temporary appointments.

The specific case is very close. The "pro forma" sessions maneuver is a novel one -- pioneered, in an exquisite irony, by Senator Harry Reid as a means of blocking appointments by the George W. Bush White House. A decision against the administration on the narrow issue of "pro forma" appointments would have had bad practical consequences -- the NLRB and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau would have ground to a halt. But it would have been defensible as application of the Constitution's text, history, and structure to the existing body of legal precedent -- that is, as the kind of work we expect a court to do.

The three-judge panel of the D.C. circuit, however, went beyond the "pro forma" question and decided two issues that were arguably not even before it. First, it said, the president can make recess appointments only between formal sessions of Congress, not when the Senate is genuinely adjourned during a session. (Two-year Congresses are usually divided into two sessions, with typically a few weeks' gap at the end of the year between them.)



Second, it said that the recess power only applies if the vacancy itself arises between sessions. In other words, a job that comes open while Congress is in session can never be filled by a recess appointment, even if the Senate adjourns completely without acting on a nomination.

This broad, indeed radical, decision illustrates the problem with "originalism" as a method of deciding, rather than analyzing, cases. Evidence from the period when a constitutional provision was framed is always relevant to a judicial decision. But so are subsequent caselaw, interpretation by other branches, and simple practicality. A court that claims to have discovered the "right" answer as a matter of "original intent," or "original understanding," or "original public meaning," may consider itself freed from all that messy precedent and history.

That's particularly unfortunate because the theory of judicial originalism centers on an indefensible intellectual claim -- that one judge, or a multi-judge panel, can somehow know the "real meaning" of a provision enacted centuries ago, in a world as alien to ours as Narnia or Barsoom. There is no recognized method for establishing such a "real meaning." In the hands of this panel, or of Justices Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas, the attempt often resembles Tegwar, the card game invented by baseball players in Mark Harris's Bang the Drum Slowly. The name stands for "The Exciting Game Without Any Rules." The game's chief function is to fleece suckers in hotel lobbies. Bad originalism, however sincerely intended by its judicial purveyors, is a hustle, too.