Recess

What this episode covers

It's hard to believe that we are coming up on ten years of Constitution Thursday... September 17th is, of course, Constitution Day, the day that the framers signed the proposed Constitution of the United States.  It is also the birthday of one John Rutledge, a member of the Convention that proposed the new Constitution. He would go on to be one of the original Associate Justices of the Supreme Court but left to become the Chief Justice of the South Carolina Court. A few years later, after Jay returned to become Governor of New York, President Washington used the Recess Appointment Claus of the new Constitution to appoint Justice Rutledge back to the Court, this time as the Chief Justice.  As the Senate would not be back in session until December, the new Chief Justice took his oath and then did something that virtually no other Chief Justice has ever done - he gave a very public speech in which he suggested something that in today's Social Media world would have gotten him instantly fired. After, of course, numerous apologetic tweets and the de rigueur screaming from chat Radio talking heads, like myself, who would alternately explain what he did or did not mean by what he said.  T he Senate, which finally came back in December, was not impressed. And the first Recess Appointment to the Supreme Court discovered that the People of the United States will always have the final say, even over George Washington...

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