News roundup from Super Bowl weekend. Madonna! World Peace! — oh wait, Syria, Egypt, Congress, taxes, jobs, labor, Columbian murders, housing, Mitt and Koch’s millions, and much more.

The last time Patrick McHenry, the Billy Zabka of the House Republican caucus, held a hearing with a member of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, it didn’t turn out too well. He called Elizabeth Warren a liar and generally tried to bully her, and received quite a backlash in the process.

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.

I keep hearing from everyone “in the know” that these foreclosure fraud settlement talks are just about wrapped up. Surely everyone’s just practicing their signatures for the big signing ceremony, right? Except that there hasn’t really been any news on the settlement for a few weeks. And now the number 3 at the Justice Department, Thomas Perrelli, the central figure running the talks from the federal government side, will step down in a couple months.

There’s wide agreement President Obama will likely have to make more recess appointments if he wants to staff key positions, including the newly-created vacancy at the Office of Management and Budget, as Jack Lew has become White House Chief of Staff. The assumption here is that Republicans will react to recess appointments at the CFPB and the NLRB by refusing to confirm any other Presidential appointee. Now California Dems want a recess appointment for the FHFA.

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.