We could talk about how just plain dumb it is for John Boehner to plan to sue President Obama for, uh…….um, well, for whatever it is that we know he did.

I prefer this take on it, though:

To sue the president, Republicans are tying themselves in ideological knots. After howling about excessive lawsuits, they are embracing long-shot litigation. After lamenting activist judges, they are now insisting that judges be more activist and shed their long-standing reluctance to adjudicate disputes between the elected branches.

Even some conservative scholars argue that lawmakers probably don’t have a legal standing for such a suit. If Republicans persuade the courts to grant them standing, the case could take years to work its way through the system, at which point Obama will be gone.

At minimum, this whole idea lends credence to the premise that government screws up everything it touches—at least when Republicans are left in charge. Still, you have to admire the moxie of someone who’d threaten a likely-frivolous lawsuit against a political opponent that he can’t directly challenge because of ne’er-do-wells in his own party, just to prove a point. I’m just not sure what that point even might be.

The risk he runs, of course, is winning, but then finding a future president of his own party constrained by precedent that seemed patriotic to him when Obama was in office, but are sure to be a hindrance to abstract nouns like “leadership” and “resoluteness” under a Republican president. (That’s my fancy way of saying that Boehner seemed fine with quite a bit of what Obama is allegedly doing right up until it was Obama allegedly doing it. That may just be politics, but keep it the hell out of our courts.)