Welcome Back to Work, Mr. President

“Appeals court unanimously rebukes Obama on recess appointments,” Ed Morrissey writes at Hot Air. “It took more than a year, but a federal appeals court has finally caught up with Barack Obama and his unilateral declaration of a Congressional recess:”

In an embarrassing rebuke, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Obama violated the Constitution by making appointments while the Senate considered itself in session:

President Barack Obama violated the Constitution when he bypassed the Senate to fill vacancies on a labor relations panel, a federal appeals court panel ruled Friday.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that Obama did not have the power to make three recess appointments last year to the National Labor Relations Board.

And as the AP also points out, the decision was unanimous … and embarrassing:

The unanimous decision is an embarrassing setback for the president, who made the appointments after Senate Republicans spent months blocking his choices for an agency they contended was biased in favor of unions.

Moe Lane of Red State adds, “the short version is that if this gets upheld by the Supremes (and the thinking is that the court is going to either uphold the smaller decision 7-2, or 9-0) then pretty much every favor Barack Obama’s done Big Labor lately ain’t worth diddly.”

Or as John Steele Gordon of Commentary writes, “Assuming this decision stands, all the decisions of the NLRB since January 4th, 2012, will be void. His appointment of Richard Cordray head to the new, and very powerful Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, made at the same time, and being challenged in a separate case, would also fall.”

Finally, the Washington Post-owned Slate has the expected unexpected! sighting, in the lede of their report on the story:

A federal appeals court offered an unexpected rebuke to President Obama today, ruling that he violated the Constitution last year when he bypassed the Senate to fill a trio of vacancies on the National Labor Relations Board.

Nobody expects the unexpectedly!

Related: At Townhall, “The NLRB Makes the Case Against Itself.”