Therefore, why would any prospective and temporary recess appointment of an Associate Justice by President Obama be considered illegal or unconstitutional, given that the recess appointment of Justice Brennan by President Eisenhower per Article II, Sec. 3 of the U.S. Constitution is an accomplished and established fact? How is that particular precedent not legally relevant or even binding to the present?

Further, what has changed during the 60 years since Brennan's appointment was first made, save for the clearly hyper-elevated levels of political partisanship and division? How is the notion of "that was then and this is now" to be presented as an acceptable legal construct?

Given your obvious breadth of knowledge on such matters, Peter, I very much appreciate and value your opinions, and I'm not challenging you on those grounds. I so happen to agree with both you and BTD that recess appointments of federal judges at any level is likely a dubious proposition at best, both legally and politically.

Rather, I'm simply posing some very hard questions that opponents of the president's authority for to make such appointments better be able to answer in the court of public opinion, should events fostered by the GOP's present obstructionism reach the point where President Obama has to consider that tool as a viable and valid option in order to fill the current High Court vacancy.

So in that regard, I would note that legal arguments can be held as controversial by the general public even if they're perfectly valid in their construct, because said arguments aren't necessarily offered in a political vacuum.

One can hold fast to a legal position that's entirely cogent and legitimate, yet still incur some very significant political, professional and personal costs in the process, should he or she choose to remain steadfast and adamant to an inevitable and often obvious conclusion.

Our country's history is replete with examples of individuals who've fallen upon their own swords and paid a serious price personally for the sake of principle, and many of them are to be admired for that, even if such admiration is all too often accorded by us in retrospect. (See Korematsu v. United States, or President Truman's decision to relieve Gen. MacArthur of his command during the Korean War, et al.)

But for every one of those selfless individuals, I'd offer that there are three to four political opportunists who'd gladly accede to the expediency of the given moment. And in this day and age of an increasingly politicized state and federal judiciary, there are likely any number of judges out there who would uphold such political conveniences as legally sound and binding, if it ever comes to that.

And I'd think that's something which any rational person has to consider, while deciding whether or not to draw the proverbial line in the sand on a given issue. Personally speaking, I certainly don't relish the idea of becoming political roadkill, no matter how right, high-minded or noble I feel the cause might be. It can be a painfully long wait before events and even history itself might eventually vindicate one's principled stand as indeed being the correct one.

In Fred Korematsu's case, 67 years had passed before acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal formally acknowledged in a 2011 court filing -- six years after Korematsu's death in 2005 -- what had already been established 28 years prior in federal appellate court, that in 1944 then-Solicitor Gen. Charles H. Fahy had deliberately suppressed critical and exonerating evidence during his arguments before the Supreme Court, pursuant to the government's stated rationale for the plaintiff's arrest and incarceration under Executive Order No. 9066. Why did the Dept. of Justice wait so long to finally concede the obvious? Two words -- political expediency.

Opponents of President Obama may indeed have sufficient legal standing for challenging any recess appointment to the Supreme Court which he might make, but I would offer that they're doing so for reasons which are entirely removed from any sense of legal principle. Rather, their arguments reek of political expediency.

And you can rest assured that as Democrats, we'll do everything we can to tie them to that obstructionist position, like an anvil to someone who's treading water. All we can do at this point is warn others to stay out of the splash zone and not get their feet tangled in the rope.

I freely concede that we may be entirely in the wrong on this particular issue of recess appointments, legally speaking. And I sincerely hope that events don't reach a point where this ever comes into play, and that Republicans will reconsider and step back from the brink of a mindless confrontation.

But there are other and greater principles at stake here, and I'm not necessarily willing to risk that our country should have to endure another prolonged period of gross Republican mismanagement and incompetence, simply for the sake of accommodating my own intellectual adherence to some legal principle. That, to quote a recent op-ed by Dr. Paul Krugman, would amount to a destructive self-indulgence.