Lachlan Markay '09 spoke Monday, Feb. 13 as part of The Heritage Foundation panel on "President Obama's Unconstitutional 'Recess' Appointments." The event focused on President Obama's recent appointments of one member of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and three members of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and sought to "examine the implications of the President's power grab, the logical results if future presidents followed suit, and the remedies that lie with Congress to restore the proper separation of powers between the Executive and Legislative branches of the federal government."
Ronald Reagan Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and Chairman of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies Edwin Meese III hosted the panel, which featured remarks by The Honorable Mike Lee (R-UT), in addition to speeches by panelists Brian Darling, Todd Gaziano, and Markay.
Markay is an investigative reporter at The Heritage Foundation, and he addressed the types of things the American people do not know about the recent nominees due to their failures to follow proper advice and consent procedures. Two of the nominees, he explained, countering President Obama's assertion that Republicans were obstructing the nomination process, never filed the paperwork that would have allowed them to be properly vetted: "Even if this committee had wanted to move on, specifically the two nominations, that had been submitted on Sept. 15, they would have been unable to do so by the committee’s very own rules which specify a certain length of time, I believe it’s five days after this paperwork is submitted, before they can take any action." The results, he argued using the specific case of NLRB Member Richard Griffin, are nominees with pasts that may have been "just cause for scrutiny" from the committee.
Watch the full video at: http://www.heritage.org/events/2012/02/recess-appointments. Markay’s part begins at 20 min.
At Hamilton, Markay majored in government and was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon.
