President Obama visited the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Friday, giving a pep talk on the work that lies ahead.

"Every one of you here has a critical role to play in making sure that everybody plays by the same rules," Obama said of the agency, created under 2010's financial regulatory reform bill to hold banks and other financial firms accountable for unfair or deceptive practices. "To make sure that the big banks on Wall Street play by the same rules as community banks on Main Street. To make sure that the rules of the road are enforced, and that a few bad actors in the financial sector can't break the law, can't cheat working families, can't threaten our entire economy all over again."

The president swung by the bureau days after appointing Richard Cordray its director, along with installing three members to the National Labor Relations Board, amid objections from Senate Republicans who had blocked Cordray's nomination last month.

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With neither side budging, the courts may weigh in next.

"The only court that would take it up would be the Supreme Court, and there's a lot of reason to believe that the Supreme Court would side with Obama," David Bositis, senior research associate for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, told The Root. "Even though they're not liberal, they tend to side with executive privilege. The Republicans' argument of ‘We're not really in recess' sounds like they're trying to take Obama's power of making recess appointments away from him. My guess is that the Supreme Court would tell Congress, 'Screw you.'"


Read more at The Root.