They’re pushing for changes — they want to rip the engine out of the car before anyone has even driven it around the block once. We had this fight. The fight went on for a year. It was over. There was a vote a year ago. And the vote was that the majority — 60 senators — voted in favor of having this Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — plenty of safeguards put in place, plenty of limits, but ultimately a strong, tough agency that can get the job done. Now there are 44 senators who just want to say, “You know, we don’t like that outcome. So we want to change it. We want you to rip the arms and legs off this agency.” Um, my answer is no. The agency is here to do a job, a job that desperately needs to be done, a job that Republicans and Democrats and libertarians and people who don’t care about politics at all care about — and that is being able to read their financial contracts, know what the price is, know what the risk is, not be overwhelmed with unreadable fine print. That’s what we’re headed [toward] and that’s what I want to see happen.
..snip..

I just want to be really clear about this: The reason we have an agency is because President Obama stood behind it. And all those fights and all those compromises that were put on the table over the last couple of years, he said no — strong independent consumer agency. The reason we don’t have a good strong director in place right now — whether it’s me or somebody else — I lay directly at the feet of those in Congress who voted against this agency to begin with and who are doing everything they can to stick a stick in the spokes to keep the wheels from turning.

Like the CFPB, Republicans have spent the past year blocking nominations to the NLRB in an effort to keep the agency from functioning. Those efforts would have paid off soon, since after Craig Becker’s term on the board expired this week, the NLRB would have been reduced to two members, which is the number it had for more than two years from 2008 to 2010. This effectively shuts down the board, since the Supreme Court ruled in 2010 that two members does not constitute a legal quorum, and thus, a two-member board can’t make binding rulings.

But it's also important to note what gave rise to this consensus. According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), it's based on Department of Justice briefs dating from the Clinton administration (see this PDF file), filed in cases disputing previous recess appointments. And on the question of just how long a recess had to last in order for a president to make appointments, the answer apparently was: three days. Why three days? That's likely derived from the fact that that's the maximum amount of time that one house of Congress can adjourn without the agreement of the other. So the thinking was that any period shorter than that wouldn't represent a Congressional agreement to adjourn. But more important than the reasoning behind the three-day threshold is the fact that this consensus came out of the executive branch, and was persuasive as an argument for that reason. The legislative branch hasn't had much to say on the subject, and in fact hasn't got much in the way of mechanisms through which to say it. It is, after all, an executive power and not a legislative one. Even the power to declare a recess of the legislature is, ultimately, left within the power of the executive according to Article II, section 3 of the Constitution:

{The president} may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper {...}
...snip...
But just as a final hedge—and in anticipation of questions about "why didn't this happen for Elizabeth Warren?"—I have to add that the rules of situational politics haven't been erased here. An earlier recess appointment, or the appointment of a different person, might very well have played differently. Those dynamics are always in flux, and operate in parallel to the raw mechanics. The point I really wanted to make is that no matter how many times I explain the rules, the truth is that they're made to be broken.

INDEPENDENT UNIT

The bureau will be an independent unit located inside and funded by the Federal Reserve, the country’s central bank. The financial reform law allows the agency to be formed on an interim basis within the U.S. Treasury.

The director must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate to a five-year term.

The bureau will have offices that are in charge of fair lending, financial education, armed services affairs, and financial protection for older Americans, among others.