Beutler isn’t impressed with the details of Boehner’s lawsuit against Obama, which came out yesterday:
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. …
[T]he GOP has spent weeks and weeks accusing Obama of unbridled lawlessness, when they didn’t really have the goods. That it unfolded against a backdrop of Republicans demanding Obama fix a child-migrant crisis at the border without providing him the legislative means to do so only underscores the point. Boehner desperately wants to avoid getting ensnared in another maximalist showdown with Obama, just to satisfy the hardliners in his conference. Some of them want to impeach a president they’ve dubbed an outlaw. So he set out to address their grievances in a different way. But in so doing, he actually just refuted them.
Drum catches on to the Speaker’s game:
Boehner is suing over a provision of the law that’s been delayed until 2016. But a lawsuit like this takes a while.
It’ll take a while to file the documents, and then a while longer to get on the calendar of a district court. Then another while for a hearing and a ruling, and then yet another while for an appeal. Then yet another while if the White House asks for an en banc review. And then finally yet another while as it goes up to the Supreme Court.
How long altogether? I’d guess a minimum of a year and a half, and probably more like two years. So the best case for conservatives is that the Supreme Court takes it up in late 2015. By the time they’re ready to rule, it’s moot because the mandate has taken effect and Obama is out of office.
Boehner is smart enough to know all this perfectly well. In other words, he knows that this is purely a symbolic gesture. Not only does Obama not really care much about it, but it’s vanishingly unlikely that the Supreme Court will ever hear the case. That makes it an almost perfect piece of theater. Neither side cares much, and it will never be decided. Boehner gets to say he’s doing something, Obama gets some mileage out of mocking him, and that’s it. The real-world impact is literally zero.
But imagining that the lawsuit goes forward, Andrew Prokop considers “what will happen if the courts decide that the House does in fact have standing to sue the president”:
Overall, the power of the presidency would be weakened, and the power of Congress and especially the courts would be strengthened. In recent decades, conservatives have tended to be suspicious of loosening standing requirements, and have argued instead for restraining the judicial role. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in a Supreme Court dissent last year that the consequences of loosening standing requirements could be vast. … But overall, those who think the president has grown too powerful and unchecked in recent years would probably be happy if the courts placed a new check on executive power. A favorable ruling for Boehner would likely make life somewhat more difficult for any president in power. For instance, one could imagine a Democratic Congress suing a Republican president for improperly implementing Obamacare, or for refusing to enforce environmental laws.
The Dish 