Less than two months after the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit invalidated President Obama’s January 2012 recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, 87 companies and several unions have cited the decision in pending actions before the NLRB, challenging its authority to rule in their pending cases.

This is in addition to dozens of separate challenges in federal court to already-decided rulings, and the Wall Street Journal reports that the litany of challenges is already putting significant strain on the NLRB, previewing the chaos that is only likely to build every month that this decision stands:

The companies are attempting to do a variety of things, including overturn or block union elections, undo penalties they were ordered to pay to fired workers and halt subpoenas. Employers also argue that at least 10 NLRB regional directors are illegitimate because they were installed by invalid Obama labor-board appointees, and say regional decisions should be voided, too.

The surge of challenges tied to the court ruling is overwhelming the NLRB, a federal agency that referees disputes between companies and employees. Working through them is delaying resolution of cases alleging unfair labor practices, including whether workers can fairly hold union elections, said Lafe Solomon, the agency’s acting general counsel.

“It’s already having a huge impact,” Mr. Solomon said. “At every stage…we’re seeing attacks” citing the appeals court decision. The board contends these challenges lack merit since it believes Mr. Obama installed the members legitimately.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. The January 25 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit invalidated the recess appointments in a sweeping and radical ruling whose reasoning would also have blocked hundreds of presidential recess appointments going back more than a century. A recent Congressional Research Service memo lists at least 652 recess appointments that would have been prevented by the ruling just since 1981. But what the legal memo doesn’t get into is that many of these recess appointments are still in effect, and would also be subject to court challenge if this decision stands.

To understand what that means, consider the implications for just the NLRB. An upheld D.C. Circuit decision would immediately call into question some 600 NLRB rulings. Its reasoning would also subject to challenge Obama’s similar 2010 appointments to the NLRB, which would subject to challenge some 1,400 rulings, according to a former Republican member. On top of that, companies are already launching challenges to the NLRB’s regional rulings, on the theory that invalidly appointed NLRB members did not have the authority to install those regional directors. Upending each of these rulings would not just unsettle established decisions; it would also roll back protections for countless of workers at each of the companies questioning these rulings.

Outside of the NLRB, the implications are no less dramatic. Most coverage has noted that the ruling would inevitably lead to a challenge to the concurrent 2012 recess appointment of Richard Cordray as Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which could invalidate all sorts of CFPB action for which a director was required. (On Tuesday, a top House member even questioned whether it should keep funding the CFPB in light of the ruling.) But consider that there are still other Obama recess appointees whose status would be called into question by this decision. At the same time as Obama appointed NLRB members in 2010, he also appointed three members to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, a body that was also operating short of its three-member quorum at the time. Case law is not as clear about whether a quorum is required for all EEOC action as it is for NLRB action. But there is reason to believe that EEOC action would at the very least be challenged by a D.C. Circuit precedent.

If reason prevails, the chaos from the D.C. Circuit’s decision will never get this far, because it will be overturned at least in part by the D.C. Circuit on rehearing or the U.S. Supreme Court. But nothing is certain on a court with at least two judges who have suggested all labor, business and Wall Street regulation is unconstitutional. And even in the short-term, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is making sure that businesses leverage this decision as much as possible to skirt workers’ rights and inundate the NLRB.

Almost immediately after President Obama’s recess appointment of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Richard Cordray ended the Senate GOP’s lawless effort to shut down that agency by filibustering anyone appointed to lead it, those same senators started spouting false claims that the president’s actions were unconstitutional. Earlier this week, however, Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley suggested that he may go even further, retaliating against Obama by escalating the Senate GOP’s already unprecedentedly aggressive campaign of obstruction against the president’s nominees:

Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said today he prefers first seeking some Senate Democrats to join in a public pushback to Obama’s four recess appointments Jan. 4, including the installation of Richard Cordray as the new director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Short of that, Grassley said, Republicans may have to go it alone with tough actions that could include holding up pending nominations from a Senate confirmation vote.

“We have got to stand our ground,” Grassley said in an interview. “You can’t let a president who takes an oath to uphold the Constitution go around the Constitution. That’s what the checks and balances are.”

Let’s be absolutely clear about what is going on here. Grassley is mad at President Obama, but his retaliation will not really hurt President Obama. Obama lives in a very nice house and enjoys a fine life regardless of whether the Treasury Department has an Undersecretary for Domestic Finance or whether the federal courts have an adequate slate of judges. The people who will be hurt by Grassley’s tantrum are the millions of consumers who depend on functioning federal agencies to safeguard their rights, the workers who depend on workplace safety and fair wage laws in order to provide for them families, and the thousands of litigants who wait months or years for justice in a judiciary burdened by far too many vacancies.

Grassley is wrong on the facts when he claims that Obama’s actions are the least bit unconstitutional, but everyone makes factually mistakes and such errors can be forgiven. What is unforgivable is Grassley’s willingness to punish millions of innocent bystanders simply to exact some kind of revenge against President Obama.

One of the most important, if overlooked, provisions in the law creating the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is a provision allowing the agency to push back against one of the most egregious errors committed by the Supreme Court in recent years — a line of decisions allowing companies to force their consumers into a privatized, corporate-owned arbitration system that overwhelming favors corporate parties. Now that CFPB Director Richard Cordray is in place, his agency can ban this practice altogether from much of the consumer finance industry:

(a) STUDY AND REPORT.—The Bureau shall conduct a study of, and shall provide a report to Congress concerning, the use of agreements providing for arbitration of any future dispute between covered persons and consumers in connection with the offering or providing of consumer financial products or services.

(b) FURTHER AUTHORITY.—The Bureau, by regulation, may prohibit or impose conditions or limitations on the use of an agreement between a covered person and a consumer for a consumer financial product or service providing for arbitration of any future dispute between the parties, if the Bureau finds that such a prohibition or imposition of conditions or limitations is in the public interest and for the protection of consumers. The findings in such rule shall be consistent with the study conducted under subsection (a).

In essence, this provision enables CFPB to prevent many lenders, investment advisers and other financial service providers from using one of the most abusive tools endorsed by the Supreme Court’s misreading of federal law — locking consumers out of real courts and forcing them into corporate-run arbitration. Moreover, because the Supreme Court recently piggybacked on its forced arbitration decisions to allow corporations to immunize themselves from the class action lawsuits that are essential to prevent companies from bleeding their consumers dry a few ill-gotten dollars at a time, CFPB can also eliminate this practice within much of the financial industry.

Lest there be any doubt, corporate arbitrators simply cannot be trusted to provide a fair hearing to consumers — in large part because corporations typically have a great deal of influence over who will arbitrate their cases. One of the most notorious forced arbitration firms — which thankfully was largely shut down after the state of Minnesota challenged its many abusive practices — once ordered a woman to pay a credit card company almost $8,000 because she had the same name as another woman who owed that company money. When a Harvard law professor who used to work part-time as an arbitrator handed down a single decision against a credit card company she was stripped of her caseload by the arbitration firm at the request of the credit card industry.

Our justice system cannot work when one side gets to choose who judges them. The CFPB’s new director has an important opportunity to restore a functioning system of justice to much of the financial industry — he should not hesitate one second before he takes it.

As ThinkProgress predicted yesterday, congressional Republicans did not wait long to whine that President Obama’s wholly legal decision to recess appoint Richard Cordray is unconstitutional. According to a blog post written by Speaker John Boehner’s staff, the Cordray appointment is unconstitutional because Obama defied an imaginary time-limit on his recess power and failed to respect the Senate’s decision to pretend that it’s actually doing something:

President Obama today made an unprecedented “recess” appointment even though the Senate is not in recess – “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,” according to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

It turns out that the action not only contradicts long-standing practice, but also the view of the administration itself. In 2010, Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal explained to the Supreme Court the Obama administration’s view that recess appointments are only permissible when Congress is in recess for more than three days.

First of all, Boehner needs to learn to count. For constitutional purposes, the Senate has been in recess since December 23. Although a single senator has opened a pretend session that lasts about half a minute — what is known as a “pro forma” session — every three days since then, these pro forma sessions have no impact whatsoever on the president’s recess appointment’s power. As Steven Bradbury and John Elwood, two key constitutional advisors during the Bush Administration, explained in 2010:

Historically, the recess appointments clause has been given a practical interpretation. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 67, the clause enables the president to keep the government fully staffed when the Senate is not “in session for the appointment of officers.” . . . [A 1905 Senate report] cautioned that a “recess” means “something actual, not something fictitious.” The executive branch has long taken the same common-sense view. In 1921, citing opinions of his predecessors dating back to the Monroe administration, Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty argued that the question “is whether in a practical sense the Senate is in session so that its advice and consent can be obtained. To give the word ‘recess’ a technical and not a practical construction, is to disregard substance for form.”

The Senate, of course, does not meet as a body during a pro forma session. By the terms of the recess order, no business can be conducted, and the Senate is not capable of acting on the president’s nominations. That means the Senate remains in “recess” for purposes of the recess appointment power, despite the empty formalities of the individual senators who wield the gavel in pro forma sessions.

Moreover, even if the Senate could stave off a recess by convening in the Neighborhood of Make Believe, it is simply not true that three days must pass before the president’s recess power kicks in. Though it’s true that Katyal once said that “I think our office has opined the recess has to be longer than 3 days,” an off-the-cuff comment by the Deputy Solicitor General does not have the power to change what the Constitution actually says. As the highest court to consider issue explained, “[t]he Constitution, on its face, does not establish a minimum time that an authorized break in the Senate must last to give legal force to the President’s appointment power under the Recess Appointments Clause.”