Will on Presidential Overreach

George Will weighed in again today on presidential overreach in Stopping a Lawless President, joining the increasing (and partisan) drumbeat against President Obama's efforts to work around congressional non-action and obstruction.  In the piece, Will takes aim at President Obama's "perpetrat[ion] [of] more than 40 suspensions of the law."  (Emphasis in original.)  Among these: Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and the delayed implementation of the ACA's employer mandate.  "Institutional derangement driven by unchecked presidential aggrandizement did not begin with Barack Obama, but his offenses against the separation of powers have been egregious in quantity and qualitatively different."

Will also explores a problem for those who'd like to stop presidential overreach in court: they don't have standing.  That's because President Obama's actions have generally helped people, not harmed them, leaving only certain taxpayers and frustrated legislators to complain.  As Will points out, David Rivkin and Elizabeth Price Foley floated a theory earlier this year in Politico that would allow legislators to sue.  And the House recently passed Rep. Gowdy's cleverly named ENFORCE the Law Act of 2014 ("Executive Needs to Faithfully Observe and Respect Congressional Enactments"), authorizing House or Senate lawsuits against the president to require enforcement of the law.  That bill will surely die in the Senate.  But Rivkin and Foley's arguments for standing don't depend on legislation.

Still, Rivkin and Foley's arguments run up against language from Justice Scalia's dissent in U.S. v. Windsor (joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas), quoted in the dissenting views in the House report on the ENFORCE the Law Act:

Heretofore in our national history, the President's failure to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed," could only be brought before a judicial tribunal by someone whose concrete interests were harmed by that alleged failure.  Justice Alito would create a system in which Congress can hale the Executive before the courts not only to vindicate its own institutional powers to act, but to correct a perceived inadequacy in the execution of its laws.  This system would lay to rest Tocqueville's priase of our judicial system as one which "intimately binds the case made for the law with the case made for one man," one in which legislation is "no longer exposed to the daily aggression of the parties," and in which "the political question that the judge must resolve is linked to the interest of private litigants."

That would be replaced by a system in which Congress and the Executive can pop immediately into court, in their institutional capacity, whenever the President refuses to implement a statute he believes to be unconstitutional, and whenever he implements a law in a manner that is not to Congress's liking. . . .

If majorities in both Houses of Congress care enough about the matter, they have available innumerable ways to compel executive action without a lawsuit--from refusing to confirm Presidential appointees to the elimination of funding.