Boehner Considering House Lawsuit Against Obama

Speaker of the House John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, is considering a lawsuit on behalf of the U.S. House of Representatives against President Obama, "challenging the executive actions that have become the keystone of the administration," reported RollCall last week.

Boehner told the House Republican Conference during a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning that he has been consulting with legal scholars and plans to unveil his next steps this week or next, according to sources in the room. [snip]

Boehner’s legal theory is based on work by Washington, D.C., attorney David Rivkin of Baker Hostetler LLP and Elizabeth Price Foley, a professor of law at Florida International University College of Law.

Rivkin said in an interview that in addition to proving institutional injury, the House would have to prove that as an institution, it has authorized the lawsuit. A vote by the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group would do so.

The suit would also have to prove that no other private plaintiff has standing to challenge the particular suspension of executive action and that there are no other opportunities for meaningful political remedies by Congress, for instance by repeal of the underlying law.

“Professor Foley and I feel that if those four conditions are met, the lawsuit would have an excellent chance to succeed. This is particularly the case because President Obama’s numerous suspensions of the law are inflicting damage on the horizontal separations of powers and undermine individual liberty,” Rivkin said.

Rivkin and Foley have argued in op-eds that most of Obama’s executive orders have been benevolent — that is, they have exempted classes of citizens from the law, for instance through deferred action for childhood arrivals. Therefore, no individual has standing to sue because the actions have helped people. Congress as an institution, however, can sue because the actions flout the laws it has have passed.

They have argued that short of impeachment, there is no other check to the president’s issuance of executive actions.

In Stopping a Lawless President, George Will argues a lawsuit remedy is preferable to an impeachment proceeding:

Advocates of extreme judicial quietism to punish the supine people leave the people's representative no recourse short of the extreme and disproportionate "self help" of impeachment. Surely courts should not encourage this. The cumbersome and divisive blunderbuss process of impeachment should be a rare recourse. Furthermore, it would punish a president for anti-constitutional behavior but would not correct the injury done to the rule of law.

O and Ocare Sinking Like Rocks

Arguing that "you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the unraveling of Obamacare," Jonah Goldberg describes the "Obamacare Schadenfreudarama" as "one of the most enjoyable political moments in my lifetime."

Alas, the English language is not well equipped to capture the sensation I’m describing, which is why we must all thank the Germans for giving us the term “schadenfreude” — the joy one feels at the misfortune or failure of others. The primary wellspring of schadenfreude can be attributed to Barack Obama’s hubris — another immigrant word, which means a sinful pride or arrogance that causes someone to believe he has a godlike immunity to the rules of life. ... In every tale of hubris, the transgressor is eventually slapped across the face with the semi-frozen flounder of reality.

Polls show the downward spiral for Obama and Obamacare. Last week it was the Quinnipiac poll. Obama's approval rating fell to 39%, and disapproval of Obamacare has risen to 55%. The shocker: 54% of young voters disapprove of Obama, and 51% of them disapprove of OCare.

This week it's the ABCNews/WashingtonPost poll. Obama's approval rating is down to 42%, and 57% disapprove of Obamacare. While hiding today's actual poll numbers, here's how the news story describes young adult voters:

At the same time, there’s also one core support group in which Obama is hurting – young adults, a group he won by an historic margin in 2008, and strongly again in 2012. The president’s overall approval rating has lost 23 points among adults age 18 to 29 since January, his steepest loss in any group. Their view that the country’s headed in the wrong direction has gained 20 points since May. And in just the past month, opposition to the health care law has jumped by 16 points among under-30s, with strong opposition up by 21 points.

Rhetoric has yielded to reality now that young healthy adults are getting hit by a law specifically designed to force them to "share their wealth" with older and less healthy folks. As Fox News reports, even college students are either seeing soaring premium cost increases in their previously cheap college health plans, or finding them cancelled entirely.

All of which explains this trend line produced by Gallup polling:



The pity is that it took so long for so many Americans to figure out what conservatives knew all along.

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UPDATE: More bad news for the president. Politico reports this additional tidbit from the ABC/WashPo poll:

As more bad poll numbers continue to pour in for President Barack Obama, a new survey finds that if the 2012 election matchup were held this month, Mitt Romney would hold the edge with the voters.

Romney topped Obama 49 percent to 45 percent among registered voters in the Washington Post-ABC News poll released Tuesday. Among all Americans, the 2012 rivals would be tied, at 47 percent.

[see also President Romney? Yes, If The Election Were Held Today ]

Liberal Chickens Coming Home to Roost

If the stakes weren't so high, these two Labor Day stories of liberal chickens coming home to roost might be very satisfying indeed.

Syria—

Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Barack Obama first embraced Syria's Bashar al-Assad as a 'reformer' to be wooed and won. When Assad embarrassed them, liberals called for Assad to be ousted (which made Al Qaeda very happy) and Obama made a very foolish public threat setting 'a red line' about Assad's use of chemical weapons on his own people.

Assad called liberals' bluff: he didn't leave power, and chemical weapons were used.

Backed into a corner, Obama let it be known he was ready to insert American cruise missiles into Syria's civil war between Assad-the-tyrant and Al Qaeda-the-uprisers.

Finding no international partners to stand with him (Britain's Parliament voted 'no involvement' last week), Obama now wants Congress to vote yea or nay on military force in Syria.

GOP Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham believe the U.S.'s reputation is on the line, but Americans aren't persuaded and a plurality/majority (depending on the poll) doesn't want U.S. intervention. With the ineptitude of Obama, Clinton and Kerry on full display, it seems few Americans on the left or right are willing to invest American blood to save their liberal faces.

This weekend as Victor Davis Hanson asked Now What?, liberal anti-war protesters picketed John Kerry's townhouse in Boston.

Unions and Obamacare—
Labor unions that fought mightily to enact Obamacare are bitterly upset that the liberal healthcare takeover is biting them in the arse, specifically in their members' work hours and 'Cadillac' healthcare plans.

In July, the AFL-CIO and two other unions "sent a scorching letter to the White House demanding Obamacare be changed before it permanently destroys the 40-hour work week."

This weekend, this headline: "Bloodbath: 40,000 Union Members Leave AFL-CIO Over Obamacare."

Liberal chickens coming home to roost!

Reason for Optimism

He has "a little over 1200 days left in office," a scandal-ridden Barack Obama recently reminded an audience. To which one New York newspaper editorial writer responded, "I imagine that he is not the only person counting down the remaining days of his presidency. ... Given his high recent disapproval polling numbers, I doubt that President Obama will have trouble finding people willing to help him pack his bags as he prepares to vacate the White House."

Given, too, his grossly heavy hand on the free-market economy, no doubt every business sector (and every job seeker) is anxious for that new day.

One business sector isn't waiting, though. As this graphic by AEI's CarpeDiem blog shows, U.S. crude oil production has soared in the last couple of years to 1990 levels.

Bottom Line: A two million bpd [barrels per day] increase in US oil output in only 24 months, almost exclusively from the dramatic increases in shale oil production made possible by revolutionary drilling technologies, is an important energy milestone and has to be one of the most remarkable success stories in the history of US energy production.

Welcome to America’s shale energy revolution, which continues to be one of the strongest reasons to be optimistic about the US economy.

If the energy sector can accomplish this feat despite Obama, just imagine what all other business sectors can do after he leaves office and his anti-free market policies end.

Obama's Psych-Ops on Americans

Psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow asserts "that this administration is engaged in a coordinated attempt to dispirit, disarm and disenfranchise large portions of the American population and to weak our founding principles through what is best understood as psychological warfare."

It began with Obama's apology tour overseas and continues through the current scandals.  But it can be overcome by acknowledging what is really happening to us and remembering who we are.

Psychological warfare has been described as a set of techniques aimed at influencing a target audience’s value systems or beliefs and inducing confessions of wrongdoing or attitudes favorable to the group proffering the techniques.