The Case for Suing the President

By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley,

Rewriting ObamaCare laws on the fly is a violation of the constitutionally mandated separation of powers.

‘So sue me” is President Obama’s message to Congress. And on Wednesday the House of Representatives took up his taunt, authorizing a lawsuit to challenge the president’s failure to faithfully execute provisions of the Affordable Care Act as passed by Congress. The House lawsuit is no “stunt,” as Mr. Obama has characterized it. The lawsuit is necessary to protect the Constitution’s separation of powers, a core means of protecting individual liberty. Without a judicial check on unbounded executive power to suspend the law, this president and all who follow him will have a powerful new weapon to destroy political accountability and democracy itself.

Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress. Article II imposes a duty on the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” When a law is unambiguous, the president cannot rewrite it to suit his own preferences. “The power of executing the laws,” as the Supreme Court emphasized in June in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, “does not include a power to revise clear statutory terms that turn out not to work in practice.” If a law has defects, fixing them is Congress’s business.

These barriers between the branches are not formalities—they were designed to prevent the accumulation of excessive power in one branch. As the Supreme Court explained in New York v. United States (1992), the “Constitution protects us from our own best intentions: It divides power among sovereigns and among branches of government precisely so that we may resist the temptation to concentrate power in one location as an expedient solution to the crisis of the day.”

The barriers also reflect the Framers’ belief that some powers are better suited for a particular branch of government because of its institutional characteristics.

The separation of powers also guarantees political accountability. When Congress makes a law and the president executes it as written, citizens will know whom to reward or punish at the next election.

A president who unilaterally rewrites a bad or unworkable law, however, prevents the American people from knowing whether Congress should be praised or condemned for passing it. Such unconstitutional actions can be used to avert electoral pain for the president and his allies.

If Mr. Obama can get away with this, his successors will be tempted to follow suit.

Litigation in federal court is an indispensable way to protect all branches of government against encroachment on their authority. States have successfully sued to stop federal intrusions into their constitutionally reserved powers. State legislators have also successfully sued to protect their institutional authority when state executives nullified their legislative power.

The executive branch is no different. President Obama has repeatedly resorted to litigation to vindicate the executive branch’s constitutional prerogatives. His administration has routinely sued states for violating federal laws, in cases such as Arizona v. United States (2012), involving the constitutionality of a state law dealing with illegal immigration.

The problem will be cured once the judiciary declares unconstitutional the president’s unilateral suspension of Affordable Care Act provisions and vacates the executive branch measures through which these suspensions were effected.

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