“It is a complete abuse of the process,” he said of Obama’s use of the recess appointment power. “It is being used for no other purpose than to overcome the Senate opposition or the Senate disinclination to agree with the president’s nominations,” said Estrada.

“The Senate by the design of the Constitution, the Appointment Clause, the primary method of appointment, has an absolute veto over nominations,” added Estrada, whose own nomination to the D.C. Circuit by President George W. Bush was successfully filibustered by Senate Democrats in 2002. In that instance, Bush did not give Estrada a recess appointment.

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Estrada said the president and the court were obliged to defer to the Senate’s own view of whether it was in session, barring some extraordinary facts to the contrary.

“If the Senate says, ‘We’re checking out and going to Hawaii. We’ll never again be in Washington Kona is very nice this time of year, that would not be permissible,” the lawyer for the GOP senators said. “Maybe if the Senate has effectively given up, you know, the business of legislating, in that case, maybe the President could say that it is, quote, a ‘recess.’”

Democratic senators did not file briefs with the court, but Estrada argued that the Senate’s actions while the chamber has been under their party’s control showed Democrats agreed with their Republican colleagues.

Earlier the court session Monday, Scalia asked Verrilli why the court should overlook language in the Constitution that says the president can make appointments unilaterally when a vacancy “happens” during a Senate recess.

“If you ignore the Constitution often enough, its meaning changes?” Scalia said sarcastically, pressing Verrilli for a yes-or-no response.

Verrilli disputed that the language requires a vacancy to arise during a particular recess for the power to kick in, but ultimately said that even if it did, the court should defer to the historical record showing numerous such appointments.

“The practice should govern,” the administration lawyer insisted.

Several justices said that the recess appointment power in the Constitution might have become an artifact of sorts, since it arose in an era when lawmakers spent only a few months in Washington each year and couldn’t easily return if a vacancy arose and needed to be filled.

Instead, recent presidents have used the power to overcome the Senate’s unwillingness to approve certain nominees.

“I don’t see what that has to do with whether the Senate’s in session,” conservative Justice Samuel Alito said.

“To be candid, the Senate is always available” now, liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said. “It can be called back on very short notice.”

“This is not the horse-and-buggy era any more,” Kagan said. “There’s no such thing truly as congressional absence any more. And that makes me wonder whether we’re dealing here with what’s essentially an historic relic, something whose original purpose has disappeared and has assumed a new purpose that nobody ever intended it to have.”

Verrilli said the founders wanted to “fortify” the president with the recess appointment power and he warned that ruling against the administration would effectively read the power out of the Constitution.

“It may be true as a matter of raw power that the Senate has the ability to sit on nominations for months and years at a time, but that is 100 miles from what the Framers would have expected,” the solicitor general said.

The case before the court, NLRB v. Noel Canning, was filed by a Washington state soda bottling company which disputed the board’s authority to act through the recess appointees.

Lawyer Noel Francisco, arguing for the company, told the court that the history of the use of the power should not take precedence over the plain words of the Constitution.

“The political branches of the government have no authority to give or take away the structural protections of the Constitution,” Francisco said. “They don’t exist to protect the Senate from the President or the President from the Senate. These are liberty-protecting provisions that protect the people from the government as a whole.”

The case before the justices does not directly involve the simultaneous recess appointment of Richard Cordray to the Consumer Financial Protection Board, but the reasoning behind any decision likely would.

However, Cordray’s longstanding nomination was confirmed in July, giving him the power to ratify many decisions he took as a recess appointee. Later that month, the Senate also confirmed five Obama nominations to the labor board, re-installing one of the panel members who was recess appointed and replacing the two others.

Despite the unfavorable reception the justices gave to many of the administration’s arguments Monday, the White House predicted victory.

“We are confident that the president’s authority to make recess appointments will be upheld by the court,” Carney told reporters Monday afternoon.

The impact of the court’s decision will probably be limited in the near term by Senate Democrats’ decision in November, through the so-called “nuclear option,” to prevent a minority of senators from filibustering most judicial and all executive branch nominations. That rule change is likely to make Senate inaction on Obama’s nominees less common through the end of this year.

However, if Republicans win the Senate this fall, or when any future president faces a Senate of the opposing party, a Supreme Court ruling undercutting the recess appointment power could shift the balance of power squarely against the president.

At times, the liberal justices did seem to lament that a ruling could overturn decades of consensus — at least within the executive branch — about the president’s power. But most also seemed unwilling to insist on preserving that power.

At one point Monday, Kagan attempted a meek defense of the administration’s claim that a vacancy that “happens” during a recess, encompasses vacancies that existed before that recess. She said one definition she saw in the Oxford English Dictionary supported such a notion.

But Scalia rejected that.

“Death is an enduring state, but if someone dies in 1941, you don’t say he died in 1945. He’s still dead,” the conservative justice said to laughter from the gallery.

Reid J. Epstein contributed to this report.