July 31, 2014 10:20AM # Suing the President: Maybe Legal, Likely Unwise By [Roger Pilon](https://www.cato.org/people/roger-pilon) --- SHARE “So sue me,” said the president. Late yesterday, [in a mostly party-line vote](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/31/us/politics/house-votes-along-party-lines-to-sue-obama.html?emc=edit_th_20140731&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=26500685&_r=0), the House authorized Speaker Boehner to do just that—to call President Obama over his repeated acts of constitutional dereliction. This is a close call, legally. But as [I argued recently](https://www.cato.org/blog/should-boehner-sue-obama), I believe it would be unwise for Boehner to actually bring such a suit, much less to initiate impeachment proceedings, as some Republicans are urging him to do. With mid-term elections less than 100 days ahead, the nation’s attention should be focused on Obama’s sorry record, not on the legal merits of a partisan suit, as inevitably would happen given the legal problems surrounding such a suit. Those problems are not insignificant. Under the Constitution’s Case or Controversy Clause, a plaintiff must have “standing” to bring a suit. In this case, the House must show some injury in fact that is fairly traceable to the president’s conduct and is redressable by the court. [The theory the House is relying on here is novel](http://online.wsj.com/articles/david-b-rivkin-jr-and-elizabeth-price-foley-the-case-for-suing-the-president-1406761584): the idea is that Congress *as an institution* is injured when the president refuses to perform his constitutional duty to execute the law, as when he postponed Obamacare’s employer mandate, thus nullifying Congress’s act and leaving it no remedy—it’s power to withhold funds from the executive branch in this regard would have no effect on his *failure* to act, as it would had he *acted* contrary to the law. That may get Congress over the standing hurdle. But again, if it doesn’t, and even if it does, attention will still be focused on the suit, not on Obama’s record. As for impeachment, that would be an even greater distraction, as we saw in the case of President Clinton, and would be a fool’s errand as well, given the Democratic Senate. Frustration over this lawless president is palpable, as the polls show. But at the end of the day, the remedy is likely to be political, not legal. Put plainly, there is a constitutional remedy for these constitutional wrongs: it’s in the voting booth. ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).