The White House also announced that the president would use his recess powers to fill three vacancies to the National Labor Relations Board, another move certain to infuriate Republicans who had urged him not to do so.
The decision to install Mr. Cordray without Senate approval under the Constitutional provision for making appointments when lawmakers are in recess was a provocative opening salvo in Mr. Obama’s re-election strategy of demonizing Congress.
The president, announcing his decision before a political rally-like crowd of 1,300 at a high school here in Mr. Cordray’s home town, seemed to welcome a contentious second session of the 112th Congress, in which any attempts at bipartisan compromise appear in danger of being lost in all-out election-year war.
“I refuse to take ‘no’ for an answer,” Mr. Obama said.
He said he had looked for opportunities to work with Congress. But, he said, “I am not going to stand by while a minority in the Senate puts party ideology ahead of the people we were elected to serve.”
Building on efforts to cast himself as a protector of the middle-class, the president portrayed Mr. Cordray as his hand-appointed protector of consumers in his role as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He wasted no time in painting Republican opposition to Mr. Cordray as another sign of the party putting the interests of Wall Street above the concerns of ordinary Americans.
“The only reason Republicans in the Senate have blocked Richard is because they don’t agree with the law that set up a consumer watchdog in the first place,” Mr. Obama said.
Republicans began attacking the appointment hours before Mr. Obama officially announced it, arguing that it was unconstitutional and calling it a brazen attempt to undercut the role of the Senate to advise and consent the executive branch on appointments.
“This is an extraordinary and entirely unprecedented power grab by President Obama that defies centuries of practice and the legal advice of his own Justice Department,” the House speaker, John A. Boehner, said in a prepared statement. “The precedent that would be set by this cavalier action would have a devastating effect on the checks and balances that are enshrined in our Constitution.”
For the president though, the appointment presented the perfect opportunity for him to try to capitalize on what the White House views as one of its greatest strengths going into the presidential election: the widespread disgust with which many Americans have come to view Congress.
By blocking Mr. Cordray’s appointment after he received majority support in the Senate — he was impeded by a filibuster — Congressional Republicans may have handed Mr. Obama another cudgel to hit them with this year, and the White House tried to pick an opportune time to wield it. The appointment seemed deliberately timed, coming a day after the Iowa caucus vote, and intended to kick dirt in the face of Republicans.
There was debate over whether Mr. Obama could have avoided a constitutional challenge by making the appointment on Tuesday in the short window between the first and second session of the 112th Congress.
By waiting until Wednesday, when Congress had a pro forma session that Republicans said meant it was not technically in recess, Mr. Obama may have provided Republicans a chance to argue that, technically, the recess appointment was invalid.
Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said White House lawyers were confident Mr. Obama had the authority to make the appointment. “When pro forma sessions are simply used as an attempt to stop the president from making an appointment,” he said, then the president is within his rights to move ahead.
President George W. Bush, by this point in his tenure, Mr. Carney noted, had made 61 recess appointments, compared to Mr. Obama’s 28. But from 2007 through the end of Mr. Bush’s presidency, Democrats, under the rule of Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, used pro forma sessions to block others.
Democrats offered strong support of the president. “Despite admitting that President Obama’s nominee, Richard Cordray, is qualified for the job,” Mr. Reid said, “Republicans denied him an up-or-down vote in an effort to substantially weaken the agency.”
Mr. Cordray accompanied the president on Wednesday on his trip to Ohio. He looked slightly shell-shocked when he got off Marine One to board Air Force One for the flight to Cleveland, clutching his brown folder to his chest as he walked to the plane.
But he sounded ready for battle once the plane landed in Cleveland and reporters cornered him under the wing, issuing a not-so-veiled warning to Wall Street.
“We’re going to begin working to expand our program to non-banks, which is an area we haven’t been able to touch before now,” he said.
Charlie Savage contributed reporting.
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