Speaker Boehner’s proposed constitutional lawsuit against the president doesn’t lack critics, including those who doubt that Congress has “standing” to bring such a case in federal court. And it’s no surprise to find some conservatives among the critics: Conservative justices and judges were largely responsible for reinvigorating the doctrine of “standing” as a constitutional limit on judicial review of statutes and regulations. 

But it is quite another thing to see liberals invoking rules of standing to bar courthouse doors, after spending decades complaining about the Rehnquist Court’s invigoration of those very same rules, ever since the Supreme Court’s rejection of environmentalists’ standing in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife (1992). This has been a common tactic throughout the Obama administration’s defense of regulatory programs, but perhaps the best example came today, from Harvard’s Cass Sunstein.