The House will have to demonstrate to a court’s satisfaction that as an institution, it has been personally harmed by President Obama’s actions, which have effectively nullified the votes of its members, leaving it little recourse to rectify this injustice without court intervention.I expect the government will argue the constitutional recourse of Congress is impeachment by the House and conviction by the Senate.
Boehner's law team will argue if the only recourse available to Congress is impeachment, in the relatively common (and currently pertaining) situation of divided government, a president whose party controls one body of Congress may be able to violate the law with impunity, assuming his own party likes the unlawful things he does. That is, a president can safely ignore laws passed under previous Congresses with opposition majorities, laws he cannot change because the opposition controls one body of the current Congress.
The dilemma facing the Supreme Court is either to decide that, oops, the framers of the constitution failed to consider the current circumstances and the document is moot with regard to it, or to decide that an answer to the question is inferred somewhere in the document, namely that a lawsuit may go forward as Congress has been harmed by the presidential nullification of their laws in circumstances where impeachment and conviction of a scofflaw president is not possible politically.
This is weighty stuff. Look at the length of the two prior paragraphs!
