Short of those two nearly nuclear options, John Boehner is reportedly considering suing the president over his planned action on immigration.

This is what the G.O.P. base wants: a fight. According to last week’s report from the Pew Research Center, Republicans, by a margin of more than two to one, want Republican leaders to “stand up to Obama, even if less gets done in Washington,” as if it were possible for this do-nothing Congress to do less.

Congressional Republicans have been sent to Washington with a mandate not so much to conduct business but rather to collect a bounty, to do what they promised and what their supporters expect: Stop Obama at any cost and at every turn, to erase his name or at least put an asterisk by it.

If the speaker should file such a suit, it could drag the Supreme Court into this partisan drama.

But it seems the court isn’t waiting for that. It has already thrust itself into the partisan fray by, to the surprise of many, taking up yet another challenge to the Affordable Care Act. This one, like the last, could prove fatal to the law.

It centers on the question of whether people who signed up through the federal exchanges are eligible for subsidies or if those subsidies are only available to people signing up through exchanges set up by states, something many Republican-led states refused to do.

Some have called this ambiguity little more than a typo in a voluminous bill. Linda Greenhouse, my Times colleague and expert interpreter of all things Supreme Court, called the decision to take the case “worse” than the court’s ruling on Bush v. Gore, as well as “profoundly depressing,” and suggested that the court is beginning to look evermore like “just a collection of politicians in robes.”

But the typo defense is complicated by the comments of an architect of the law, Jonathan Gruber, a health economist. In 2012, he said, “if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits.” This suggested that the clause was no accident, or at least one he and others found fortuitous.