Found on the Internets …
House of Representatives to Sue President Obama
[Speaker John Boehner] plans to secure House approval for a lawsuit alleging that Obama exceeded his constitutional authority by unilaterally delaying the Obamacare employer mandate by one year, to 2015. It’s unclear if the suit has a serious chance of success, legal experts say, but it’s plausible.
The first question is whether Boehner can achieve standing to bring the litigation in the first place. This is uncharted waters for House of Representatives. Never before have the courts granted standing to lawsuit emanating from Congress against a president’s executive actions. There have been previous lawsuits of the sort brought by individual members of Congress, but those have been thrown out for lack of standing.
Some legal experts believe Boehner is destined to lose on the same grounds.
“The House of Representatives as an institution hasn’t suffered the sort of concrete, particularized injury that the courts are constitutionally empowered to review. This is a political dispute, not a judicial dispute, and the courts will properly leave it to the political branches to sort it out,” wrote Nicholas Bagley, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School.
Jonathon Capehart in WaPo: There’s no there there
[Constitutional scholar Laurence] Tribe told me yesterday that he is “now convinced that there’s no ‘THERE there.” And that was BEFORE the speaker released language of a bill seeking authorization to sue the president “over the way President Obama unilaterally changed the employer mandate” in the Affordable Care Act. Boehner’s announced action solidified Tribe’s view.
“The very fact that Boehner is willing to say the House of Representatives is injured by the President’s decision to delay the implementation of the employer mandate is bizarre in itself, given how often the House has voted not just to delay it but to scuttle it,” Tribe told me via e-mail last night. “And it’s hard to imagine what conceivable remedy a federal court could possibly issue: an order directing the President to reverse course and implement the employer mandate sooner? Hardly!”
Well, when the purpose of the lawsuit is to raise funds for the mid-term elections, it does not have to make sense.
More …
House GOPer: No Grounds To Impeach Obama; We Should Just Sue Him
“We are not working on or drawing up articles of impeachment. The Constitution is very clear as to what constitutes grounds for impeachment of the president of the United States. He has not committed the kind of criminal acts that call for that,” Goodlatte said on ABC’s “This Week.”
“We do believe that the President is not enforcing the law. And there’s a wide array of issues, not just immigration, where we believe that,” Goodlatte said. “And that’s why the speaker, and many of us in the Congress, are getting ready to take legal action to stand up for the people’s right, for their elected representatives to be the part of our government that passes laws, not a president with his pen and his cell phone.”
I wonder if that is an Obamaphone.
This is how Republicans destroy their own narrative of the lawless Obama presidency: with a faceplant.
With so many instances of law breaking to choose from, one got the sense that he was working on a fairly meaty complaint, even if the House stood little chance of winning in court.[…]
But on Thursday evening, Boehner laid down his cards. All but one were blank. It turns out Obama’s vast and indisputable misconduct is limited to one act of enforcement discretion: his decision to delay implementation of an Affordable Care Act’s requirement (one Republicans despise) that businesses with more than 50 employees provide their workers health insurance or pay a penalty.
Now, here’s the depressing part: Boehner’s sue first, ask questions later strategy just might work. Not because the suit has merit but because the Supreme Court has several activist Republican justices. They recently rewrote the First Amendment to declare that corporations have souls and thus have freedom of religion.Unable to marshal the votes to get their legislative agenda through the Senate and unable to earn the votes to recapture the White House, it may be that the Republicans’ strategy for the foreseeable future is to ignore their losses at the ballot box and leave the heavy lifting to the one place where five Republican votes can cancel out tens of millions of Americans’ votes: the Supreme Court.
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