“Is that the way the Founders reckoned things would work?” That’s what these columns asked when the Senate resorted to “micro-sessions” to block President Obama from using a recess appointment to name Richard Cordray director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Yesterday three of the judges who ride the District of Columbia circuit for the United States Court of Appeals concluded, in an otherwise unrelated case, that it was the president who was out of line.

Well, let’s just say it’s another piece of evidence of something we have been noting for the past several years — that our country is in “a constitutional moment.” By this we mean that our politics are so divided, and the Republican and Democratic camps so disinclined to any compromise, that in order to resolve things we’re going to have to dig down to constitutional bedrock. And let us just say, too, that it’s a glorious thing to watch.

The dispute that the court ruled on yesterday involved recess appointments Mr. Obama made to the National Labor Relations Board. Three of the board’s five members were put through by that method. Judge Sentelle writes that the court’s attention was first arrested by the most fleeting of grammatical differences between the way the National Labor Relations Board, on the one hand, and the Constitution, on the other hand, refer to recess appointments.

The Constitution says: “The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.” However, according to the court, the NLRB argued that the alternative appointments procedure of the clause is, as the court put it, “available during intrasession ‘recesses,’ or breaks in the Senate’s business when it is otherwise in a continuing session.”

One of the complaints of the judges is that the NLRB never deigned to state how short a break is too short to serve as a “recess” for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause. “This,” the judges reckoned, “merely reflects the Board’s larger problem: it fails to differentiate between ‘recesses’ and the actual constitutional language, ‘the Recess.’” They then offered a short disquisition in respect of the difference between the indefinite article – such as “a” — and the definite article, namely “the.”

Thunder and lightning. You talk about digging down to American bedrock and peering at it with a Madison’s magnifying glass. This is the glory of the law. This is an inspection of what the Founders were trying to tell us. “As a matter of cold, unadorned logic,” write Chief Judge Sentelle and his colleagues, “it makes no sense to adopt the Board’s proposition that when the Framers said ‘the Recess,’ what they really meant was ‘a recess.’ This is not an insignificant distinction. In the end it makes all the difference.” Wrote the riders:

“Six times the Constitution uses some form of the verb ‘adjourn’ or the noun ‘adjournment’ to refer to breaks in the proceedings of one or both Houses of Congress. Twice, it uses the term “the Recess”: once in the Recess Appointments Clause and once in the Senate Vacancies Clause, U.S. Const. art. I, § 3, cl. 2. Not only did the Framers use a different word, but none of the ‘adjournment’ usages is preceded by the definite article. All this points to the inescapable conclusion that the Framers intended something specific by the term ‘the Recess,’ and that it was something different than a generic break in proceedings.”

The court also offered an essay on the meaning of the word “happen.” This is because of the recess appointments power is to fill up all vacancies “that may happen during the Recess of the Senate.” The circuit riders reckon that the recess appointments power relates to vacancies that “arise,” not just “exist,” during a real recess. And they did so with a lecture on one of the most radical features of the United States Constitution, namely that is is a written document.

“The power of a written constitution lies in its words. It is those words that were adopted by the people. When those words speak clearly, it is not up to us to depart from their meaning in favor of our own concept of efficiency, convenience, or facilitation of the functions of government. In light of the extensive evidence that the original public meaning of ‘happen’ was ‘arise,’ we hold that the President may only make recess appointments to fill vacancies that arise during the recess.”

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It’s not yet clear what President Obama is going to do about the ruling just handed down. If he fails to appeal, Mr. Obama will be in quite a bind. If he does appeal, we will see what the Nine make of it. Whatever else one can say about Judge Sentelle, he’s no dummy. He put in his opinion a reference to the gun control case known as District of Columbia v. Heller, which parsed the meaning of the Second Amendment using the most careful attention to grammar. The more one thinks about it the more logical a methodology it is. Otherwise, why would the Framers who crafted the Constitution have bothered to write it down?