You sues, you lose
by Tom Sullivan
Republicans lost a major foreign policy fight yesterday when Democrats in the Senate filibustered a resolution to disapprove President Obama's nuclear treaty with Iran. Over in the Animal House, Speaker John Boehner stood up and declared that the situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part: Frivolous lawsuit!
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) promised Thursday that House Republicans will “use every tool at our disposal to stop, slow and delay this agreement from being fully implemented” up to and including suing President Obama to keep him from enforcing the agreement.
Maybe someone else is keeping better count, but that would make at least three times Boehner has gone to the judicial bench after being humiliated in the Congress. The Washington Post report continues:
If Republicans pursue a legal strategy, it wouldn’t be the first time they tried to check an Obama-driven law (see: Obamacare) in the courts. But the tactic wasn’t terribly successful: the Supreme Court sided with the Obama administration on major portions of the health-care law, though lawsuits are still ongoing and Republicans won one legal battle on Wednesday that may embolden them.
The House’s new approach will undoubtedly fail, given that seemingly all Republicans are opposed to the agreement. But while the exercise allows critics to register their discontent — and claim purity-of-purpose points by not legitimizing the idea that the Obama administration fulfilled its end of the bargain — it won’t do anything to block the deal’s implementation.
The legal battle Republicans won yesterday was simply that they had standing for their Obamacare lawsuit to proceed. U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer allowed the portion to go forward that would challenge whether the Obama administration had spent monies on health subsidies that Congress had not appropriated. She disallowed challenges to White House changes to the employer mandate.
“The president's unilateral change to ObamaCare was unprecedented and outside the powers granted to his office under our Constitution,” Boehner said in a statement. “I am grateful to the Court for ruling that this historic overreach can be challenged by the coequal branch of government with the sole power to create or change the law.”
In other futile gesture news, outside the Capitol on Wednesday the Stop the Iran Deal Rally "felt more like a coda for a failed summer campaign to scuttle the deal than a useful means of accomplishing anything," writes Jim Newell at Slate. T-partiers at the rally will likely transfer their anger towards Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for "allowing" the deal to go through.
Newell found this colorful character at the rally:
“Obama is a black, Jew-hating, jihadist putting America and Israel and the rest of the planet in grave danger,” said Bob Kunst of Miami. Kunst—pairing a Hillary Clinton rubber mask with a blue T-shirt reading “INFIDEL”—was holding one sign that accused Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry of “Fulfilling Hitler’s Dreams” and another that queried, “DIDN’T WE LEARN ANYTHING FROM 1938?” His only reassurance was that, when Iran launches its attack on the mainland, it’ll be stopped quickly by America’s heavily armed citizenry.
And he votes, ladies and gentlemen.