No grounds to impeach.
No standing to sue.
Whatever's a toothless House to do?
I've been decrying the lawsuit that the House is trying to bring against POTUS, as being without merit and a waste of the taxpayers money.
But it turns out that it's worse than meritless. Worse than futile.
It's downright puerile.
How many times has the House of Representatives voted to repeal, undo or gut the ACA?
54 times, at last count. Not all were to repeal the law, but the point of nearly all of them was to cripple the law, or make it unworkable.
Given the GOP's unreasonable hatred of the law, partly to do with an employer mandate, you would think that when the President signed an executive order to delay implementation of the employer mandate, they would have applauded it.
Here's what Forbes had to say about it, back in July, 2013:
The executive branch is charged with enforcing the law, and it can of course choose not to enforce the law if it wants. But people can sue the federal government, and a judge could theoretically force the administration to enforce the mandate.
So the question is: Would anyone sue the Obama administration over this? Employers, of course, will be thrilled to be spared the mandate for one more year. Democratic politicians, similarly, will be glad to have this not hanging over their heads for the 2014 mid-term election.
The wild-card is left-wing activists. Most, you’d think, would defer to the administration on questions of implementation. I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that all it would take is for one judge to issue an injunction, for an activist to require the administration to enforce the mandate.
See? The people who were SUPPOSED to sue,
were you and I!!
But who ACTUALLY got pissed off by the Executive Order (in a transparently craven way)?
Republican lawmakers immediately reacted to the unfairness of Monday’s announcement that the Obama administration will delay the Obamacare mandate for medium-sized employers while millions of struggling Americans are still bound by the individual mandate.
See? See how much the GOP CARES about the little guy? They want to take his health insurance away make sure a Democrat doesn't get the credit for giving them health insurance.
We all know the GOP rarely says what it really means, because when it DOES, the American people vote more Democrats into office (2006, 2012)
So, why were the Republicans REALLY pissed off about the employer delay?
Republican former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin called the move “deviously brilliant,” by removing a potential electoral impediment from in front of congressional Democrats before the midterms.
“Democrats no longer face the immediate specter of running against the fallout from a heavy regulatory imposition on employers across the land,” Holtz-Eakin wrote. “Explaining away the mandate was going to be a big political lift; having the White House airbrush it from the landscape is way better.”
Shorter Holtz-Eakin: The GOP got out-smarted.
That is why they are bringing a lawsuit against Obama in 2014. Because he took away, what they thought to be, their main argument against more Dems getting elected in 2014.
They're trying to counter-act the damage by making the President look bad.
But this too will backfire.
Here's why..............Laurence Tribe's analysis of the lawsuit itself:
1. Despite arguments the other way, the House of Representatives doesn’t have standing because none of Boehner’s accusations shows any harm to the House as an institution.
2. >The nub of the complaint is the claim that President Obama is failing faithfully to execute the Affordable Care Act — the very law that the House has tried fifty times to repeal — because he has delayed the effective date as of which companies with more than 50 employees will be required to extend insurance to their employees if they are to avoid being assessed a tax penalty by the IRS.
[...] But.................
According to the Assistant Secretary for Tax Policy, the delay is based on the Treasury Department’s “transition relief” authority under Section 7805(a) of the Internal Revenue Code, which has been used to delay the application of new mandates of this kind by prior administrations (including the Bush administration) on a number of prior occasions. So the much-ballyhooed Boehner lawsuit turned out to be a great big fizzle when the veil was lifted and the Speaker was pressured to put up or shut up.
3. The judicial branch has no role to play in any event. If there were a clear abuse of power, which there hasn’t been, the constitutional remedy would start with an “I” & not an “L” – impeachment, and not litigation. The irony is that Congress would be asking the judiciary to usurp a role the Constitution assigns exclusively to Congress.
The U.S. House already knows
that it can't impeach. They're already coming right out and admitting it:
Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), chair of the House Judiciary Committee, on Sunday said the House doesn't have grounds to impeach President Obama.
"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."
So, if they can't shoot from the hip, they've decided to shoot themselves in the foot instead??
Shorter Boehner: The ACA is socialism because the employer mandate forces employers to insure their employees.
So, Obama delays the mandate, and he gets sued.
Face it John, you got played. Throwing a tantrum in court (if it even gets there) is going to get more DEMOCRATS elected this year.
UPDATE: Some Editorials on the lawsuit, from around the web:
Red-State!
The House GOP Should Man Up Instead of Resorting to Political Theater in the Courts
By: Erick Erickson (Diary) | July 7th, 2014
John Boehner and the House Republicans may lack the testicular fortitude to fight President Obama, but I would kindly ask that he save the taxpayers further money on a political stunt
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Suing and fuming: Boehner’s lawsuit against Obama is a bad move
July 1, 2014
By the Editorial Board
Most Americans would agree that this nation has too much partisanship and too many lawsuits. In announcing last week that he will seek legislation for the House of Representatives to sue President Barack Obama, Speaker John Boehner embraces a double dose of negativity.
Even if legislation permitting a lawsuit could be passed, the case would be pursued at taxpayers’ expense. Mr. Boehner, in sticking up for his institution, is not sticking up for them. Members of Congress are paid to do their jobs; running to the courts because they have a problem with the president is not in the job description.
The Iowa City Press-Citizen
GOP lawsuit is a gift for Democrats
July 6, 2014
House Speaker John Boehner must think that suing President Obama will help Republicans in November.
I think he has given a rare gift to the Democrats. This will excite the Democratic base like nothing the Democrats could do themselves.
Seventy percent of Americans will know this is just a political stunt and would much rather Boehner and the House spend their time doing the people's business on raising the minimum wage, extending unemployment benefits, legislation on equal pay for equal work and immigration reform that even a majority of Republicans are for.
William Peterson
Dallas News
Editorial: Border crisis reveals pointlessness of Boehner lawsuit threat
It places into stark relief such silly ploys as Speaker John Boehner’s vow to rally the House to pass legislation allowing it to sue President Barack Obama to force him to “follow his oath of office and faithfully execute the laws of our country.”
Even quoting from Boehner’s rationale gives this silly idea more credit than it’s due. That it should come from a leader of a Republican Party that has fought nuisance lawsuits and activist courts for decades offers a new rung on the irony ladder.
If Boehner and congressional Republicans had exhausted all constitutional measures, that might be one thing. But it’s far from the case.
Chicago Tribune
Boehner's misguided lawsuit against Obama A gambit that is bound to fail
July 13, 2014
So let's get this straight. John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, whose party wants to repeal Obamacare, plans to sue President Barack Obama for failing to fully implement Obamacare. The president, who did everything he could to push the measure through Congress, refuses to enforce provisions that he signed into law.
Who declared it Opposite Day in Washington? Next we'll be seeing the tea party demanding higher taxes and Nancy Pelosi joining the National Rifle Association.
Forbes
Suing The President: Why It Sounds Nice But Doesn't Work
I wish I could say that House Speaker John Boehner’s developing plan to sue President Obama for abuses of executive power is a good idea. I really do. The record of such abuse is long and significant, from unilaterally suspending and delaying portions of Obamacare to altering fundamental aspects of immigration law by executive order. Indeed, the U.S. Supreme Court recently and unanimously reversed the president’s abuse of power in making executive recess appointments that were not, in fact, during a congressional recess. There is ample evidence for the proposition that President Obama has fundamentally altered the Constitutional balance of power among the branches of government in ways that should be reversed.
But is this a problem for which the courts are an appropriate solution? Unfortunately, for both legal and political reasons, the answer is “no.” And the sooner Speaker Boehner and his Republican colleagues realize that such a lawsuit against the president will be a legal failure and, like Senator Ted Cruz’s attempt to shut down the federal government over Obamacare, a political bust, the better.