Heidi Alexander: “So this was written at a time when Senator Sam Houston of Texas had to ride a horse, get on a steamboat, get in a…”

“So this was written at a time when Senator Sam Houston of Texas had to ride a horse, get on a steamboat, get in a stagecoach, and make his way to Washington over a period of 5 or 6 or 7 weeks, and the same to go home; and when President Polk had a vacancy in 1846 in the Attorney General's Office and wrote a letter to someone in New Hampshire and invited him to take the position and that took 2 or 3 weeks to get the letter, and then in 2 or 3 weeks back came the answer: No. Communication was a little different back then, so it was necessary, for the government to operate, to put into the Constitution that when the Congress, the Senate was home--which meant all over this big, grand country, before the days of communication and travel--that during a 4- or 5- or 6-month period, the President could appoint someone to that position during the recess, the Constitution says. The Constitution says, according to the court, that when a vacancy occurs during the recess, the President may make an appointment during that recess. So the court was talking about only one recess, and that is the one between the annual sessions of Congress--the one between when we end in 2012 and start in 2013. Since that time, starting right after the Civil War, the President and Congress have been inventing these various ideas about other recesses.…”