Okay, as the kidz say on the Intertoobz, this.

If the president really sticks to what he's done today, then we are seeing the belated beginnings of open warfare with the vandals in the Republican congressional caucuses, both in the Senate and in the House. There is no question that the president has the obvious right of things when he says that Richard Cordray is not yet the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau because a lot of Republicans in Congress simply don't want a law passed by the Congress and signed by the president to function. They don't want it to function for two reasons, neither of which has fk-all to do with the common good. They don't want it to work because a lot of them have been bribed by the financial-services industries, which really don't want it to work. And they don't want it to work because it might work, and President Obama would get credit from all those people who are sick of being stuck up for fees, and spurious late charges, and by fine print that might as well be written in Klingon. This might help him get re-elected, and the vandals would rather than not happen, thanks, and to hell with the fact that your interest rate just got jacked up a couple of points because the shrimp was warm at the last Bank of America outing.

I think the Republicans might be getting the message, too, if the wounded bleatings of Mitch McConnell are any indication:

Although the Senate is not in recess, President Obama, in an unprecedented move, has arrogantly circumvented the American people by 'recess' appointing Richard Cordray as director of the new CFPB. This recess appointment represents a sharp departure from a long-standing precedent that has limited the President to recess appointments only when the Senate is in a recess of 10 days or longer...

Hold it a minute. A bit of common sense got caught in my throat there. This is Mitch McConnell complaining about someone "arrogantly circumventing the American people"?

Pardon me, but who got elected again in 2008? The "arrogant circumventing" of that particular decision made by the American people started before the poor guy even put his hand on the Bible.

This is Mitch McConnell complaining about "a sharp departure from a long-standing precedent"?

Pardon me, again but exactly how many filibusters, and threats of a filibuster, have there been in the Senate from the minority that McConnell leads? How did we get to the point that it takes 60 votes to pass anything in the Senate?

He goes on:

The CFPB is poised to be one of the least accountable and most powerful agencies in Washington. Created by the deeply flawed Dodd-Frank law, it is subject to none of the checks that independent agencies normally operate under, and will have an unprecedented reach and control over individual consumer decisions.

Pardon me a third time, but exactly which of my individual consumer decisions will this new agency exercise its "unprecedented reach and control"? My individual consumer decision not to get cheated by a mega-bank? My individual consumer decision not to get gouged by some beancounter in South Dakota because my payment's one day late? It's not like Richard Corddray is going to be leaping out from behind the sweater vests at Old Navy and hurling himself atop the cashier's desk, forbidding me to buy that new pair of khakis. This agency, as I understand it, is on my side against the forces that looted most of the economy and wrecked the rest. You know what, Mitch? I'll chance it. Truly, I will. I like to live dangerously.

And if you really want to go to court to protect the rights of the banks to bleed the rest of us to death, have at it. The commercials write themselves.

The president followed this up with a strong speech in Ohio. He said, in part:

Now is the time to do everything we can to protect consumers and prevent a financial crisis like the one we've been through from ever happening again. And that starts with letting Richard Cordray do his job.

This has to be just the beginning, though. If he's really going to make Congress the proxy opponent in his re-election bid, there can't be any let-up. He has to be as stubborn as they are. He has to be willing to be seen as being as reckless as they are. If I were he, and there were that many left on the table, I'd have made a couple dozen recess appointments before lunch. The Republicans have chosen deliberately to paralyze the government at a very fragile time in our history. They have done so because they were paid to do so, and because their own ambition and petty dislike for a president has drained whatever interest they had left in acting in the national interest. This is serious political malpractice, and it has to be fought as such, every day, on every front. There is no compromise on this point. Not any more.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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