Remember a few months ago when John Bohner was talking about filing a ridiculous law suit against Barack Obama? Politico points out that, despite the Republican hype, we haven’t heard anything about this suit recently:
House Speaker John Boehner came out swinging hard last June when he announced that his chamber would take President Barack Obama to court. The suit, charging that the president grossly exceeded his constitutional authority by failing to implement portions of the Obamacare law, was billed as an election-season rallying point for aggrieved Republicans. But days before the midterms the House’s legal guns seem to have fallen silent.
Lawyers close to the process said they originally expected the legal challenge to be filed in September but now they don’t expect any action before the elections.
Some attribute the delay to electoral politics — suggesting that Republicans were worried it could rile up the Democratic base — though the GOP is mum on why the suit has yet to be filed.
Whatever the reason, the delay means the core of the suit could effectively be moot before the Obama administration even has to respond to it in court. The case was expected to center on an employer mandate provision that Obama twice delayed but is now set to kick in for many employers on Jan. 1.
Bloomberg says the suit might be more trouble than it is worth for the Republicans:
Part of the problem may lie in the troubled history of the suit. In mid-September, the GOP’s law firm dropped the case over “political pressure,” according to a Republican aide speaking to Politico. That same week, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out a lawsuit similar to the House’s from the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.
Politically, the lawsuit presents catch-22s for the GOP. First, the party has to choose between upsetting conservatives (some of whom support impeachment) by not suing the president or bewildering the rest of the country by suing the president.
A July CNN/ORC poll found that 65 percent of Americans don’t think the president should be impeached, 57 percent don’t support the lawsuit, and less than half of respondents thought Obama has gone too far with his executive orders. Fifty-six percent of conservatives were in favor of the impeachment, compared to 26 percent of moderates.
The lawsuit was a compromise, but appeasement didn’t really work. The pro-impeachment conservative wing of the party has been given voice by Sarah Palin, who told Breitbart News that “you don’t bring a lawsuit to a gunfight.”
Second, if Boehner had gone through with suing the president before the midterm elections, it might have help Democrats fundraise and motivate the liberal base even more than it already had. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee made $7.6 million in the month after the suit was announced, including $2.1 million in one weekend off emails warning of impeachment.
Plus Republicans might be embarrassed if small businessmen realize that the Republican Party is pursuing a lawsuit which seeks to punish Obama for trying to make conversion to the Affordable Care Act easier for small business, as many small business owners had requested. This hardly sounds like where the Republicans should draw the line in the sand against what they claim is tyranny from the Obama administration. Of course they had to settle for this suit as they couldn’t find anything of substance with which to pursue this absurd claim.
