Tonight the President will deliver the State of the Union Address, at the beginning of his run for re-election. Unlike Obama’s other addresses to a joint session of Congress, I wouldn’t expect this one to produce much in the way of a legislative blueprint. It’s an election year, and most of the major issues will be determined by the outcome of that election. The President will instead try to set the agenda for the fall campaign with this speech, and the early excerpts show his focus on an economy “built to last.” Not unlike a Ford truck.

The House Republican position on President Obama’s recess appointments is hard to even express without laughing. GOP Congressmembers are actually saying that they oppose the appointments because Congress is not in recess – and as soon as they finish their vacation and get back to Washington, they’ll have something to say about that.

The President is making a distinction between nominees who the various agencies can do without for a spell and nominees whose seating is crucial to the functioning of the agency.

The White House announced its lawyers view the President’s power to make recess appointments to be unfettered by GOP pro forma efforts to keep the Senate in session merely to obstruct the power to make appointments. This means the President may soon make other recess appointments, including to the National Labor Relations Board, which currently cannot operate because it lacks of quorum.

The President will make a recess appointment today for Richard Cordray to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, opening up the bureau to regulate non-bank financial institutions and giving the new agency its first leader. This is a bold move by the President, and to put it in context, it’s important to understand it follows massive obstruction by GOP Senators.

President Obama missed his chance yesterday to use the “Roosevelt precedent” to appoint Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or make any recess appointment. But the Wall Street Journal reported that the President got legal clearance to basically ignore the pro forma sessions being held by Congress, enabling a recess appointment at any point in this holiday break.

During the recess, the President has a number of opportunities to make recess appointments. He could simply determine that the pro forma sessions being used to keep Congress active were insufficient to prevent recess appointments. He could use his Constitutional power to adjourn Congress. Or he could follow the Teddy Roosevelt precedent. But it appears he won’t.

The recess appointment fight nominally only concerns Richard Cordray, the nominee to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans want to block his confirmation because they stop the agency from gaining regulatory powers over non-bank financial institutions if they remain without a director. But a number of other nominees are caught in the crossfire of this fight, in particular nominees to lead other key financial industry NLRB regulators.

As is typical at the end of the year, Harry Reid attempted to clear out a backlog of uncontroversial Presidential appointments before the holiday break. But Mitch McConnell would not allow it. He wanted assurances, instead, that the President would not seek out any recess appointments during the break, and he objected to moving the outstanding nominees until that time.

This may come as a surprise, since throughout this year Republicans have been able to use pro forma sessions to never take Congress into recess, thereby blocking recess appointments. Indeed, that was the plan for this holiday break as well.

The Obama Administration, expecting that we’re in an age where the normal rules of politics apply and not an age of nullification, nominated two labor officials for open slots on the National Labor Relations Board. That board will see previous recess appointments expire at the end of the year, leaving it without a quorum and unable to function. The two appointees would fill the Democratic spots on the board.