Obama's Recess Appointment and Media Interpretation

Today, President Barack Obama decided to make a recess appointment of Richard Cordray to run the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Republicans have been blocking this nomination for months, not because they mind Cordray as CFPB chief but because they mind the CFPB itself. This would all be the normal course of things, were it not for the fact that the Senate is not technically in recess. They've remained in pro forma session, though of course all 100 Senators are out of town and no work is getting done. The Associated Press story covering the appointment described things thusly:

He [Obama] is essentially declaring the Senate's short off-and-on legislative sessions a sham intended to block his appointments.

See, this is just false. Obama is not declaring that; he's declaring that, because those "sessions" are, as everyone knows, a sham intended to block his appointments, they are invalid and the Senate counts as being in recess anyway. (Incidentally, I think that's a perfectly reasonable interpretation: if every Senator has gone home for an extended period of time, and no Senate work is being done, it counts as a constitutional recess no matter what they decide to call it.) It's just true, and to the best of my knowledge undisputed, that these "sessions" are a sham intended to deprive Obama of his constitutional recess-appointment power. Instead of saying so, though, the AP presents this factually true statement as something Obama is "claiming." As in, implicitly, "and Republicans claim this to be false, and we can't/won't tell you who's right." C'mon, people.