A telling omission in what’s meant to be a rebuke of Obama’s lawlessness
House speaker John Boehner’s lawsuit against President Obama strikes a high-minded blow for the rule of law. Gamesmanship? Perish the thought. “This isn’t about Republicans and Democrats,” the Speaker thundered on the House floor. “It’s about defending the Constitution we swore an oath to uphold.”
Well, that’s a relief. For a moment there, I was worried that it might be a “political stunt,” which is what the soon-to-be defendant sloughed it off as.
In urging the House to approve the resolution authorizing the suit, which it did in a party-line vote Wednesday, Boehner asserted that Congress needed to act — er, well, let’s try that again. He asserted that Congress needed to plead with the judiciary to act because President Obama has overstepped his constitutional bounds. It takes a lawsuit, we are told, to check what the resolution describes as certain “actions by the President and other executive branch officials inconsistent with their duties under the Constitution of the United States.”
Good to know it’s all about duty and constitutional propriety, not tactical considerations. But I do have one question: If the lawsuit is really about vindicating the Constitution, why didn’t the Speaker include the president’s immigration lawlessness?
Have a look at the resolution, here. It authorizes Boehner to sue Obama and his underlings for actions inconsistent with their “duties under the Constitution and laws of the United States.” But read on through the fine print — the gobbledygook of statutory citations — and you find that the lawsuit will be narrowly limited to executive overreach with respect to Obamacare.
Don’t get me wrong: The president’s implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is, inarguably, a solid example of his lawlessness. In Faithless Execution, I outline the dozens of executive diktats: waiving this provision, amending that one, manufacturing taxes and criminal penalties, and generally usurping congressional power.
But what about the president’s other serial statutory violations and unconstitutional usurpations? His systematic dismantling of federal immigration law outstrips even Obamacare in its brazen illegality. Yet, though this fact is well known to Boehner, a reference to immigration is nowhere to be found in his resolution or his lawsuit.