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.
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