President Barack Obama formally nominated Thomas Perez on Monday to become his next secretary of labor, calling on the Senate to swiftly confirm the Justice Department official.

Obama introduced Perez, an assistant U.S. Attorney General, at the White House this morning. Perez would be the only Latino member of Obama's second-term cabinet, replacing another prominent Latina, outgoing Secretary Hilda Solis.

"His story reminds us of this country's promise," the president said of his nominee. "Tom's made protecting that promise for everybody the cause of his life."

"Tom's knowledge and experience will make him an outstanding secretary of Labor, and there's plenty of work to do," Obama added.

Labor relations have sometimes been a point of contention between the Obama administration and Republican lawmakers during the president's first term. The GOP dug in against the Employee Free Choice Act, a collective bargaining reform favored by organized labor and labeled as "card check" by detractors. And the president's recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board have prompted court challenges.

Obama's pick won hearty praise from the labor community.

"President Obama has made an excellent choice in nominating Thomas Perez to lead the U.S. Department of Labor," said Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). "During his time as Labor Secretary in Maryland, Mr. Perez’s had a strong record of enforcing labor laws, especially wage and hour and other violations that stood in the way of workers earning a fair wage. Enforcing these labor laws help to close the income gap between the wealthy and everyone else."

In his own remarks, Perez emphasized his interest in speaking to Republican and Democratic senators alike as part of the confirmation process.

Handing a huge legal victory to Republicans, a federal appeals court in Washington has ruled that a president can make recess appointments only during a congressional recess when the vacancies arise.

The ruling came Friday from a three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.  Business groups challenged last year's recess appointments to the NLRB, the National Labor Relations Board, and the court ruled today in their favor.

"The filling up of a vacancy that happens during a recess must be done during the same recess in which the vacancy arose," the court said.

Last January, President Barack Obama infuriated Senate Republicans by naming Richard Cordray to be director of the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and by putting three new members on the NLRB. (Obama re-nominated Cordray to a full appointment at the same position on Thursday.)

"It's clear the president would rather trample our system of separation of powers than work with Republicans to move the country forward," House Speaker John Boehner said at the time.  "I expect the courts will find the appointment to be illegitimate."

The court ruled today on a challenge to the appointments brought by a Pacific Northwest soft drink bottler who lost a union dispute before the NLRB. The company claimed that the president had no power to appoint the new NLRB members, and that the subsequent action by the board therefore lacked legitimacy.

At the core of the dispute is Article II of the Constitution, setting out the president's duties and authorities. They include "the power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate."

During the nation's first century, Congress was in session less than half a year. The recess appointment power allowed the president to keep the government functioning by filling important jobs when the Senate was not around to act on nominations.

"There is no reason the Framers would have permitted the President to wait until some future intersession recess to make a recess appointment, for the Senate would have been sitting in session during the intervening period and available to consider nominations," the court said today.

In modern times, presidents of both parties have used the power to make appointments during much shorter congressional recesses in the summer and around holidays. 

But during the George H.W. Bush administration, Democrats came up with the idea of pro forma sessions, in which the body was gaveled to order then immediately adjourned for another few days. They claimed that the Senate remained in session and recess appointments could not be made. Senate Republicans have since continued the pro forma practice. 

"Such short intra-session breaks are not recesses," the bottling company argued.  "Otherwise, every weekend, night, or lunch break would be a 'recess' too."

Senate Republicans joined the lawsuit. They argued that by declaring the Senate incapable of performing its functions during the pro-forma sessions, "the President usurped the Senate's control of its own procedures. And by appointing officers without the Senate's consent, he took away its right to review and reject his nominations."

The Obama Justice Department argued that the pro-forma procedures, each lasting less than a minute, are a sham and do not mean the Senate was actually in session.  "It could not provide advice or consent on presidential nominations during that 20-day period," government lawyers argue.

In agreeing to its holiday break, Justice Department lawyers note, the Senate "provided by order that 'no business' would be conducted."

The government lawyers said there's nothing mysterious about the meaning of the word recess -- "a break by the Senate from its usual business, such as periods in which the Framers anticipated that senators would return to their respective states."
 
"The pro forma sessions were not designed to permit the Senate to do business, but rather to ensure that no business was done," the Justice Department claimed.

President Obama invoked the recess appointment power 32 times during his first term to fill vacancies in full-time government positions, though he has not made any since last January's controversy. President Clinton made 95 recess appointments during his administration.  President George W. Bush used the power 99 times. 

If, as seems likely, the issue gets to the Supreme Court, the justices could settle a passionate debate over a presidential power used hundreds of times, stirring controversy since the beginning.

REDFORD, MICH. – President Barack Obama traveled Monday to Michigan to tout a new investment in domestic auto jobs, while using the opportunity to assail the state's Republican lawmakers for pursuing "right to work" legislation.

Obama renewed his offensive to pressure Republicans into extending middle class tax cuts, calling on Congress to pass legislation making the Bush-era tax rates for those making below $250,000 permanent.

But this trip to the Detroit-area came with some extra baggage in the form of a state-wide union battle over a right-to-work law that Michigan’s governor, Rick Snyder (R) has pledged to sign. The president addressed the union controversy towards the middle of his remarks:

"We should do everything we can to encourage companies like Daimler to keep investing in American workers," Obama said, "what we shouldn’t be doing is trying to take away your rights to bargain for better wages and working conditions."

Related: Lawmakers implore Michigan gov. to halt or delay 'right to work' law

The audience responded enthusiastically as  the president continued: "These so-called right-to-work laws, they don't have to do with economics. They have everything to do with politics. What they're really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money."

While Snyder did not join the president for his event at the Daimler-owned Detroit Diesel Corporation, the governor did greet Obama on the tarmac along with some of  the Democratic members of  Michigan’s congressional delegation.

Snyder had a meeting with many members of the Michigan delegation earlier today to discuss the legislation, which would make mandatory payment of union dues or fees as a condition of employment illegal. On the flight to Michigan, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney noted that the president’s opposition to right-to-work laws was “well known” and the optics of this were brought even more into focus by the president being accompanied on his tour of the engine plant by the UAW NW Local 163 Detroit Diesel Engine Unit Shop Chairperson Mark Gibson, and multiple people in the crowd sporting UAW stickers. Currently, 23 states and Guam have some type of right-to-work legislation on the books.

Saul Loeb / AFP - Getty Images

President Barack Obama speaks on the economy and fiscal cliff negotiations after touring the Daimler Detroit Diesel Plant in Redford, Michigan, December 10, 2012.

But while the president was on the tour of the Redford engine plant, the clock continued to tick towards the end of the year and the so-called fiscal cliff. Obama again insisted that tax rates on the wealthiest Americans should be allowed to go up,

"What you need is a package that keeps taxes where they are for middle-class families," he said. "We make some tough spending cuts on things that we don't need, and then we ask the wealthiest Americans to pay a slightly higher tax rate. And that's a principle I won't compromise on."

He didn’t mention his meeting over the weekend with House Speaker John Boehner, choosing instead to focus the blame on Congress if taxes go up for everyone at the end of the year.

"If Congress doesn't act soon -- meaning in the next few weeks -- starting on Jan. 1, everybody's going to see their income taxes go up. It's true,” the president said.  The audience loudly booed and the president responded, “You all don't like that.”

Michigan's congressional delegation met Monday with Gov. Rick Snyder, asking him to veto or at least delay a vote on a "right to work" law moving through the state's legislature.

Democrats and organized labor groups have launched an all-out blitz they are hoping might halt legislation that would establish workers' rights to employment in a workplace without having to join a union. The Republican-held state legislature passed versions of the legislation last week, and are set to bring it up for final consideration as soon as Tuesday.

Snyder, a first-term Republican governor who's fashioned himself as a more pragmatic leader, has said he would sign the bill if it came to his desk.

"We strongly urged the governor to veto the so-called right to work bill, or at a minimum, ask the legislature to delay the vote on it," Sen. Carl Levin said in a conference call to describe Democrats' meeting with the governor. "The governor listened, and he told us that he would 'seriously,' in his words, consider our concerns."

Snyder's office had no immediate reaction to Democrats' characterization of the meeting.

Michigan has become the latest Midwestern epicenter over labor rights as a result of this fight, following Ohio and Wisconsin. The Republican governors of those states led efforts to curb or eliminate collective bargaining rights for public employees' unions.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin

National Democrats have begun to wade into the fight as well, issuing blistering statements warning against the Michigan proposal. The fight could be elevated further this afternoon, when President Barack Obama visits the Detroit area in a previously-scheduled trip.

Democrats are particularly incensed by a procedural move used by Republican authors of the bill which would prevent the law from being challenged by a statewide referendum. The Democrats who met Monday with Snyder said they had also urged the governor to change that provision, so that the right to work proposal could be brought to a popular vote.

PHILADELPHIA -- Mitt Romney doesn't "get" fire fighters, Vice President Joe Biden charged Wednesday, marking the complete return to political combat after last weekend's pause following the Colorado theater shooting.

Speaking to over 3,000 fire fighters at their annual convention in Philadelphia, the vice president said that Romney "means well" but that he and his party fail to grasp the motives of public sector workers who put their lives in jeopardy for others in their communities.

"I think part of the problem is I don't think he gets you," Biden said. "I don't think he really understands - I mean this sincerely - I don't think he understands what you're all about, what makes you tick, what makes you decide to go into this profession, which you couldn't pay enough to 90 percent of the population -  including me  - to do what you do every day."

Biden, who emotionally referenced the role of firefighters in saving his sons' lives in the 1972 crash that killed his wife and daughter, lamented a "perfect storm" of economic woes and anti-union campaigns that have hit at the core of the hook-and-ladder profession.

"They act like you're the community's problem," he said of Republican lawmakers aiming budget cuts and other reforms at unionized public sector workers. "As if you're not part of the community. As if somehow you're from some other place. As if you haven't been as affected by this recession as your neighbors have, not because you're a firefighter, because you're a middle class citizen."

The vice president, whose recent comments describing a de-facto "depression" for America's unemployed were vigorously highlighted by Republicans, on Wednesday described the country as "barely" out of the economic recession.

"This is about shared responsibility," he said, noting the administration's push for tax hikes on high earners. "You know as well as we do the country is out of this recession but barely and struggling to move forward. I mean, you have ... blood brothers, blood sisters, who because of this recession are out of work."

The Romney campaign responded with a statement from Fred Donnelly, a retired battalion chief of the Philadelphia fire department.

“Joe Biden can come to Philadelphia, and he can try and tell the hard working men and women of this city that he understands what we’ve been going through. But no matter what he says, he can’t cover up the words of the president," Donnelly said. "The President may think the private sector is ‘doing fine.’  He may want small businesspeople to believe that they ‘didn’t build that.’  But we know that he is simply out of touch with the struggles that middle-class Americans are going through, and that he doesn’t understand what drives the American economy.” 

Biden's remarks, while perhaps slightly less pointed than a typical campaign speech, marked a public return to the partisan punches that preceded last week's massive shooting at an Aurora, Colorado theater.

Mentioning the heroism of rescue squads in that community, Biden lauded fire fighters for aiding at the massacre's scene and for dismantling the shooter's booby-trapped apartment.

"You were there ready to do whatever was needed if the worst happened," he said.

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says he fears that Republicans would do to labor unions at a national level what they’ve sought achieve in the states should Mitt Romney win the presidency and the GOP control Congress come next January.

Underscoring the stakes for organized labor in this fall’s election, the head of one of the nation’s largest unions described for NBC News what he said was a strategy to strengthen labor in the long term, and guard against Republican efforts to curb workers' rights.

“We’re not looking at a single election anymore; we’re actually looking at three elections: the elections in 2012, the elections that will happen in 2014 and the elections that will happen in 2016,” Trumka said on Monday.

T.J. Kirkpatrick / Getty Images

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka announces a boycott of Hyatt Hotels during a press conference July 23 in Washington, D.C.

It's part of a shift by the AFL-CIO to a broader focus beyond politics and this year's presidential election, just the most high-profile of a series of political battles endured by labor this year. The most bruising fight played out in Wisconsin, where Republican Gov. Scott Walker survived a recall effort spurred by his work to enact legislation stripping public sector unions of most of their collective bargaining rights, and forcing them to make greater contributions to their benefits plans.

Labor lost in Wisconsin; Trumka said that the national labor movement deferred mostly to local officials on waging that campaign, and suggested he might have done things differently had he been in charge. And the AFL-CIO’s political director, Michael Podhorzer, pointed to a 2011 vote to overturn an Ohio law on collective bargaining similar to Wisconsin’s as more instructive.

But beyond those two states, labor has been made into somewhat of a scapegoat for state budget crises by Republican governors and has been forced to accept increased concessions.

And if Republicans capture control of Washington in this fall's election, the AFL-CIO said it’s bracing for that same fight on the national level.

“If there’s a Republican trifecta, of course they will go after labor. We’re the last line of defense,” said Trumka. “So they’re going to do what they did in the states. In 20-some states they attacked us because they saw us as standing in the way.”

Trumka said he would expect, at a minimum, for Romney to pick business-friendly officials to sit on the National Labor Relations Board. Romney wasn’t the most unfriendly of Republicans as governor of Massachusetts – “I wouldn’t say we called him ‘Uncle Mitt,’ but it was a much different relationship. He wasn’t antagonistic, he wasn’t hostile,” said Trumka – but, like the rest of the Republican Party, has shifted to the right over time.

Moreover, the AFL-CIO president argued that the conservative drift within the GOP has purged any moderates with which the union could partner. He named only two Republican lawmakers — New Jersey Rep. Frank LoBiondo and Ohio Rep. Steve LaTourette — as reliable allies, and said he considered centrists like Maine Sens. Olympia Snowe (R) and Susan Collins (R) as "no longer moderates."

But the union is also serving notice to Democrats that they shouldn't automatically expect the AFL-CIO's support, either. The AFL-CIO has endorsed President Obama's re-election bid, but winning a second term wasn't the union's top priority, Trumka said. Their top three priorities, he said, were "jobs, jobs and more jobs."

To that end, the AFL-CIO is preparing an economic agenda for release on July 31 that includes the litany of priorities the union views as important for boosting employment.

"It’ll give us an opportunity to say to people: here’s one vision for the economy, here’s another vision," he said. "Which of these two do you endorse? If it’s this one, good luck, if it’s this one, then we can do business together and help you get elected."

But political observers shouldn't make the mistake of assuming that the union has entirely abandoned its political advocacy.

The AFL-CIO has had core staff in six states — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida — on the ground and working for months. And a labor-affiliated super PAC has allowed the AFL-CIO and other unions to communicate more directly with nonunion employees (despite the fact that Trumka noted they oppose the Citizens United ruling that gave way to the rise of super PACs).

"This is going to be a battle of the airwaves versus a battle of the grassroots," Trumka said. "We’ll see what happens."

With the labor movement reeling from the result of Tuesday's recall election in Wisconsin, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka sought to downplay the significance of Gov. Scott Walker's victory over a union-driven effort to unseat him. 

Trumka, the leader of one of the nation's largest labor groups, dismissed the notion that unions might look back upon their unsuccessful campaign against Walker with regret.

"We didn't decide on this recall. It was the workers in Wisconsin and the voters in Wisconsin who did," he said on a conference call with reporters. "Hell, I don't know if we'd do anything differently."

First Thoughts: Walker wins and labor loses

The AFL-CIO president highlighted instead two mitigating factors from Tuesday's recall, in which Walker beat out Democratic opponent Tom Barrett by 7 percentage points. 

Trumka pointed to Walker's sizable advantage in spending between his own campaign and allies who flooded the airwaves in Wisconsin. Trumka also stressed the recall of a Republican state senator, which flipped control of that chamber from Republicans to Democrats. 

"This isn't the crystal ball that predicts the future; this is a very unique circumstance," he said.

The AFL-CIO also circulated a poll of union members who voted on Tuesday that reflected strong support for collective bargaining rights and generally stingy opposition to Walker. 

Trumka noted — to his chagrin — that much of the debate during the closing weeks of the Walker-Barrett campaign had shifted away from the initial debate over organized labor.

The whole effort to recall Walker was prompted by the governor's pursuit of a controversial state law stripping public sector workers of that privilege. 

Walker emerges victorious in Wisconsin recall

Wednesday's call was just the opening wave of postmortems associated with the recall, and the effort by groups with a stake in the race to spin (favorably or unfavorably) the outcome. 

One of the biggest open questions for proponents of the recall will be whether President Barack Obama could have done more to aid the Barrett campaign. 

"I think there's probably some mixed feelings," Trumka acknowledged of Obama's distance from the race, noting also that he wasn't interested in second-guessing the president's participation.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Mitt Romney on Wednesday detailed his education proposals in a major policy address, laying out a plan to promote school choice and reform existing laws -- all while combating teachers' unions, whom Romney blamed for obstructing many of the needed changes in the nation's schools.

Romney assailed President Obama as beholden to powerful organized labor groups during a speech to the Latino Coalition here in the nation's capital.

In his speech, the former Massachusetts governor called improving public education "the civil rights issue of our era," saying that unions favor teachers' well being over students', leading to an education system that Romney said was "third-world" in nature.

"The teachers unions are the clearest example of a group that has lost its way. Whenever anyone dares to offer a new idea, the unions protest the loudest," Romney said, quoting a former leader of the American Federation of Teachers. "He said, and I quote, 'When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of children. The teachers unions don’t fight for our children. That’s our job.'"

Romney almost seem to draw on the experience of Govs. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Chris Christie of New Jersey, each of whom have achieved a moderate amount of political traction by doing battle with teachers' unions in their respective states.

Antipathy between Romney and teachers' unions has deep roots, though, reaching back to Romney's tenure as governor in Massachusetts, when teachers' groups ran advertisements fighting Romney's implementation of a statewide test required for graduation. Romney mentioned the ad battle, which was not in his prepared remarks, and decried unions wielding "outsized influence in elections and campaigns."

"As president, I will be a champion of real education reform in America, and I won’t let any special interest get in the way," Romney said. "We have to stop putting campaign cash ahead of our kids."

Obama has stressed the importance of working with unions, an important Democratic Party constituency, in his past efforts to pursue education reform. A top adviser of Romney's suggested, though, that Romney would work around the powerful teachers' groups in implementing his agenda.

"The opposition is going to be led by the teachers unions which of course have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo," senior Romney adviser Eric Fehnrstrom told reporters on a conference call. "We are not handcuffed at all by the political limitations faced by president Obama, who is completely beholden to the union leadership."

Romney's most ambitious effort would be to greatly expand school choice programs for disadvantaged students and their parents in a way similar to the capital's D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. Romney's program would allow any low-income or special needs student (in the so-called Title One category) to attend any public or public charter school in their state, without regard to district.

"For the first time in history, federal education funds will be linked to the student, so that parents can send their child to any public or charter school of their choice," Romney said.

Romney told donors in April that he hoped to dramatically reshape -- but not eliminate -- the Department of Education, and also said Wednesday that he hopes to make the evaluation of schools and teachers a state responsibility, instead of a federal one, as it exists under President Bush's controversial No Child Left Behind law. Romney said that landmark law represented a "giant step forward," but was also "not without its weaknesses."

Romney advisers said before the speech that none of the presumptive GOP's proposals today would involve new federal spending.

There were some elements of the Romney plan, though, that were still wanting for details. His plans to improve teacher quality were ill-defined; Romney vowed to consolidate federal programs designed to boost teacher quality and block grant their funds -- about $4 billion dollars -- back to states that he asserted would adopt "innovative policies" for improving teacher quality.

And Romney only briefly touched upon his plans to increase the affordability of higher education, vowing to "stop fueling skyrocketing tuition prices," but providing no specifics in his speech as to how to accomplish such a task.

The Obama campaign savaged Romney's record on education before his speech had even been delivered, declaring Romney's views on education are just the latest example of a philosophy designed to help only those at the top.

“Mitt Romney’s career in both the private and public sectors has been guided by one principle: helping the wealthiest prosper by any means necessary, even if it means undermining workers and middle class families. These are the values that he would bring to the White House and that would prioritize budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans over good schools and affordable higher education," Obama campaign spokesperson Lis Smith said in a statement. 

President Obama roused union members behind supporting his re-election bid in a speech Monday to labor leaders, a core Democratic constituency with which his administration has had differences in his first term.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

President Barack Obama speaks April 30 at the Building and Construction Trades Department Legislative Conference.

"These have been some tough years we’ve been in," Obama said to members of the Building and Construction Trade Department, an AFL-CIO-affiliated group. “I know a lot of your membership can get discouraged. They can feel like nobody’s looking out for them. They can get frustrated and it sure is easy to give up on Washington.”

Among those labor members who have expressed their frustration with Washington -– including the president –- is AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who in January criticized the administration’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness for focusing on reforming regulations and the tax system.

There are varied other instances in which unions that supported Obama during the 2008 election felted jilted by the president. Labor leaders pushed for a more robust stimulus and jobs program, and were generally disappointed deeply by Obama's decision to jettison the so-called "public option" as part of health care reform. The Employee Free Choice Act, a priority of organized labor that had enjoyed administration support, also died in Congress amid heavy business opposition.

Unions have also been generally supportive of a plan to build the TransCanada Keystone Oil pipeline, development of which the administration has mostly blocked.

Obama told the group Monday that, while he has not always been “a perfect president,” he has kept his promise to labor unions –- and, by extension, all voters.

“I made a promise I’d always tell you where I stood, I’d always tell you what I thought, what I believed in. And most importantly, I would wake up every single day working as hard as I know how to make your lives a little bit better," he said. "And for all that we’ve gone through these three-and-a-half or four years, I have kept that promise."

While not mentioning presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney by name, Obama also contrasted his views on labor with those of Republicans, saying that the party wants to weaken labor unions.

“If you asked them what's their big economic plan in addition to tax cuts for rich folks, it's dismantling your unions,” Obama said.

He criticized Republicans for advocating so-called “right to work” laws, which bar unions from requiring prospective employees to join as a precondition for being hired. Twenty-three U.S. states currently have such laws.

“I believe when folks try and take collective bargaining rights away by passing so-called ‘right to work’ laws that might as well be called ‘the right to work for less and less,’ that's not about economics -- it's about politics," Obama said.

He said that his support for labor unions was evident in his belief in strong collective-bargaining rights.

“The right to organize and negotiate a fair pay for hard work should be the right of every American -- from the CEO in the corner office to the worker who built that office,” he said.