Right-wing judicial activism has been ascendant in recent years. Five years ago, in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court, rewrote decades of Second Amendment jurisprudence to thwart local legislators who passed gun control laws. Three years ago, in Citizens United, a majority of the Justices overturned decades of precedent to deregulate modern campaign financing. But even these decisions, and others like them, pale beside last week’s extravagant act of judicial hubris by the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. There, in Canning v. National Labor Relations Board, three federal judges revealed themselves as Republican National Committeemen in robes.

The facts of the case were straightforward. The N.L.R.B. is supposed to have five members, and it cannot act without a quorum of three. After Republicans in the Senate obstructed the nominations of President Obama’s three nominees to the board (a fact not mentioned, revealingly enough, in the opinion), the President made so-called recess appointments to fill the vacancies.

Recess appointments, which are specifically authorized in the Constitution, have been facts of political life for decades. When faced with senators’ refusals to act on nominations Presidents simply made appointments while the Senate was not in session. There was some political controversy about whether they should exercise this power, but no legal challenge to their right to do so.

As the Times reported (but the D.C. Circuit, once again, did not see fit to mention), President Bill Clinton made a hundred and thirty-nine recess appointments, while George W. Bush made a hundred and seventy-one, including those of John R. Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations and two appeals-court judges, William H. Pryor, Jr., and Charles W. Pickering, Sr., Obama has made only thirty-two such appointments, including that of Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The D.C. Circuit nevertheless found that Obama’s appointment of the three N.L.R.B. members was invalid. According to the court’s tortured reasoning, the Senate was not really “in recess” when the three were named. Indeed, the opinion essentially said that the Senate need almost never be in recess; a handful of senators could create “pro-forma” sessions that would trump any President’s ability to make appointments. Even beyond that, the opinion more or less removed the President’s ability to use recess appointments in all but a small handful of cases, suggesting that the vacancies would have to occur, not just remain unfilled, during recesses. The appointments of not only the N.L.R.B. commissioners but also of Cordray, and all of the actions of his new organization, are now in clear jeopardy.

So, who cares? Why does this dispute about an obscure constitutional provision matter? And who benefits from the court’s decision?

The decision matters because it is a huge gift to the contemporary Republican Party—especially to Republican senators. Senate Republicans have engaged in an unprecedented level of obstruction of President Obama’s nominations—to executive-branch positions, to independent agencies, and especially to federal judgeships. Recess appointments have given Obama a small degree of leverage to fight back. Characteristically, he hasn’t used this power much, especially compared with his predecessors; Obama has tried to negotiate his way out of the problem, with little to show for it. But the D.C. Circuit decision, if it stands, essentially gives veto power to Senate Republicans. If they simply refuse to act on Obama’s appointments, he is now powerless to respond. The opinion also said that any action taken by improper recess appointees would be invalid. So the opinion could paralyze a major chunk of the federal government. Filibusters by senators who don’t approve of the United Nations could prevent us from having any ambassador at all; indeed, these senators could theoretically leave a President without any Cabinet members at all.

Who wrote this judicial atrocity? No surprise—it was David Sentelle, who has a long and disgraceful reputation as a partisan hack on the bench. A protégé of Jesse Helms, his fellow North Carolinian, Sentelle is most famous for engineering, in 1994, the dismissal of Robert Fiske as the Whitewater Independent Counsel and replacing him with Kenneth Starr. (How’d that work out?) As a judge, Sentelle has been a thoroughgoing reactionary for thirty years. He was joined in his opinion by two fellow Republican appointees to the D.C. Circuit.

Where, one might ask, were President Obama’s appointees to the D.C. Circuit, often described as the second most important court in the country? After four-plus years as President, Obama has succeeded in placing exactly zero judges on this court. The reasons for this absence reflect the strange record of this President on judicial appointments. To some extent, Obama has simply been asleep at this particular switch, nominating judges late or not at all. Obama did nothing while D.C. Circuit vacancies lingered, before finally nominating Caitlin Halligan, a widely respected New York prosecutor. Halligan, in turn, was shamefully filibustered by the Republicans in the Senate, like so many other Obama appointees. Obama has resubmitted Halligan, along with another excellent nominee, Sri Srinivasan, to the Senate—where they languish. Thanks to Sentelle’s decision to take senior status, there are now four vacancies on the D.C. Circuit. Obama’s lassitude plus the Republicans’ obstruction equals decisions like this one on recess appointments.

The Obama Administration will surely challenge the Sentelle ruling—either before the full court of appeals or in the Supreme Court. Like the health-care decision, this one is so terrible that it might stir even some Republican judges to overturn it. Some day, of course, there will be a Republican President, and this decision will give Senate Democrats the chance to cripple him or her, too. John G. Roberts, Jr., and Samuel A. Alito, Jr., both started in government during the Reagan Administration; they have a real appreciation for executive power, and they may resist giving the Senate unlimited power to make mischief. Or they, like Sentelle, may simply want to cripple a Democratic President now and worry about Republican Presidents when the time comes.

In any event, the D.C. Circuit’s decision is a useful reminder of where power resides in Washington. Presidents come and go, but the judges are there forever. And they know it.

Photograph by Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty.