“The president changed the health-care law without a vote of Congress, effectively creating his own law by literally waiving the employer mandate and the penalties for failing to comply with it,” Boehner said in a statement at the time. “That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work. No president should have the power to make laws on his or her own.” The irony was that House Republicans had repeatedly assailed the employer mandate as a jobs killer, and yet here they were suing to force the administration to implement it faster.

The first step for Boehner was to engineer passage of a resolution formally authorizing the House to sue the president. In drafting that resolution, the speaker’s legal team left themselves some wiggle room. Instead of specifically focusing on the employer mandate, the resolution authorized the House to initiate litigation over the implementation of “any provision” of the Affordable Care Act. That would become important later.

It’s not easy for anyone to sue the president or his administration, and as House GOP leaders would soon find out, it is particularly difficult for one chamber of Congress to bring a lawsuit against the executive branch. Courts have traditionally deferred to the president in legal conflicts with Congress and have been reluctant to serve as a referee for political disputes that are ordinarily hashed out through the give-and-take of legislative negotiation. Because Democrats controlled the Senate at the time, House Republicans appeared to be at a disadvantage since only one half of Congress would be claiming injury as a result of the administration’s actions.

Further complicating matters, the House GOP struggled to find a lawyer who would actually take the case to court. The first two firms the House hired quit, supposedly under pressure from Democratic clients who did not want to be associated with such a partisan case. Boehner’s office considered forgoing outside counsel entirely or combining the Obamacare suit with a legal challenge to the president’s executive action on immigration. Finally, they found a lawyer who would commit to the case, Jonathan Turley, and in late November 2014, the House sued the administration.

When the House filed its suit in federal district court, the administration’s delay in implementation of the employer mandate was not the only challenge it brought. The complaint also cited a much more technical matter—the government’s funding of subsidies to insurance companies that reduce the cost of co-payments, deductibles, and other costs for low-income people. As The New York Times has reported, staffers for the House Energy and Commerce Committee discovered that there was no explicit congressional appropriation for the $130 billion or so over 10 years that the government was sending to insurers as reimbursements. The administration argued that language in the Affordable Care Act meant for the program to be funded permanently, while the lawsuit countered that it was subject to annual appropriations by Congress. Since the Republican-controlled Congress had never explicitly appropriated the money, they argued, the Obama administration was violating the Constitution by spending money without approval from legislators.