When a president delays or exempts people from a law – so-called benevolent suspensions – who has standing to sue him? Generally, no one. Benevolent suspensions of law don’t, by definition, create a sufficiently concrete injury for standing. That’s why, when President Obama delayed various provisions of Obamacare – the employer mandate, the annual out-of-pocket caps, the prohibition on the sale of “substandard” policies – his actions cannot be challenged in court.

After Boehner said last week that immigration reform was officially dead for the year, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart took a swipe at his own leadership by arguing that the best way to curb the threat of Obama’s executive action on the matter was to actually pass legislation – an implicit rejection of the rationale behind Boehner’s lawsuit.

And yesterday, during a speech at Hillsdale College, Rep. Paul Ryan offered his own thoughts on asking judges to intervene in political fights:

“Finally, there is the temptation to ask courts to intervene and solve our problems for us. Some conservatives think of judges the way Progressives think of bureaucrats: technical experts with the solutions to our constitutional conflicts. But judges, like bureaucrats, are often the problem. We must be mindful of this temptation. It is true that the Supreme Court can be an ally in conflicts surrounding the Constitution. But it can also be an adversary.”