This is a guest post is by my Cato Institute colleague Thomas Berry. What follows is written by him (Berry), not me (Ilya Somin):
President-elect Trump has demanded on X that Senate Republican leadership "must agree to Recess Appointments (in the Senate!), without which we will not be able to get people confirmed in a timely manner." In this post I'll explain the consequences of allowing recess appointments, why the Senate has not done so for over a decade, and why it would be unwise to allow recess appointments now.
First, here are the basics on congressional timelines. These days, each 2-year Congress comprises two 1-year sessions, running from January 3rd of one year to January 3rd of the next. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sessions were much shorter than a year, and they had months-long gaps in between them when members of Congress traveled home.
