The GOP Mandate on Foolishess

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has finally announced the basis for his party's proposed lawsuit against President Obama.  It's not what anyone expected.

what eye thynk:   After weeks of hearing Republicans talk about the necessity of filing a lawsuit in order to stop the lawless and over-stepping President, the best Mr. Boehner and his party could come up with is a suit based on the President's postponing of the employer mandate provision in the Affordable Care Act--not the steps the President has taken to move ahead on immigration; not the new regulations against carbon emissions, not the executive order raising the minimum wage for employees working under government contract, not the pending executive order designed to give workplace protection to gay employees--they are suing the President over a year long postponement of the ACA's requirement that employers with 50 or more full-time employees provide health care for their workers.

The suit's focus becomes even more ridiculous when we remind ourselves that it was small business owners themselves who asked for the postponement and it was the GOP who urged the White House to grant the request.  Just last summer, Republicans were crying to the media that the employer mandate was going to kill jobs and was going to force these companies out of business.  They vehemently complained that the requirement was unworkable, it was too fast, too much, too soon.  So basically, John Boehner is planning to ask the House to vote on whether they should go forward with a lawsuit that complains about the fact that the President acceded to a demand they themselves made less than a year ago. 

As Steve Benen pointed out earlier this week, in order for a judge to put the suit on his court's docket, Mr. Boehner must demonstrate that the plaintiff, (the GOP), will be harmed or will face the threat of harm by the act in question.  They "can't simply go to court and argue to the judge 'We don't like the president.'  They need to show how they've been adversely affected by the delay itself."

Good luck with that.  I don't see success in the future for a lawsuit that says "We loved this idea in 2013, but then the President did what we wanted, which caused us to hate it so much in 2014 that we are being harmed by this thing that we thought we loved."

Mr. Benen's article attempted to answer some obvious questions about this dynamic:

"*Given how upset Republicans are, Obama's move must have been unprecedented. Actually, it's not.  When the Bush/Cheney administration was implementing Medicare Part D, officials used executive power to move implementation deadlines around in order to make the law work more effectively.  No one cared--and certainly no one sued.

*Do Republicans support the employer mandate?  No they vehemently oppose it...

...*So Boehner is suing because Obama isn't implementing Obamacare fast enough?  Pretty much."

And that's it in a nutshell, the GOP hates the ACA, has spent millions of dollars voting to repeal the ACA and uncountable sound bites railing against the ACA and is now planning on filing a lawsuit saying they are being harmed because the ACA isn't happening fast enough.

Can the Republican Party possibly make themselves look any more foolish?