President Obama Makes Recess Appointments To The EEOC

President Obama Makes Recess Appointments To The EEOC

On March 27, President Obama announced he would make recess appointments to the EEOC. Similar to his recess NLRB appointments, the EEOC appointments appear at first blush to be pro-employee. Mr. Obama made the following appointments: for EEOC Chair- Jacqueline Berrien; for Commissioner- Chai Feldblum and Victoria A. Lipnic; and for EEOC General Counsel—P. David Lopez. Coming from individual rights backgrounds, Ms. Berrien most recently served as Associate Director—Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Also, Mr. Lopez served as a Supervisory Trial Attorney with the EEOC’s Phoenix District Office. Perhaps President Obama’s most high-profile appointment, Chai Feldblum, is a Georgetown law professor and was influential in drafting the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and ADA Amendments Act of 2008. Professor Feldblum is also the co-director of Workplace Flexibility 2010, an initiative aimed to advance a national policy on workplace flexibility. Coming from an employer-representative background, Victoria A. Lipnic is a former Assistant Secretary of Labor under the Bush Administration, in-house counsel to the U.S. Postal Service and an attorney with the management-side law firm of Seyfarth Shaw.

Each of these individuals had previously been nominated by President Obama to these posts and had been favorably voted on by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. However, no action had been taken for a full-Senate vote, due to the controversy over Mr. Obama’s NLRB nominations. The President’s recess appointments bypass Senate confirmation and are therefore limited to serving until the end of the next session of Congress.