IN A nearly party-line vote, the House of Representatives has authorised its speaker, John Boehner, to sue Barack Obama for flouting the constitutional limits of his executive authority. House Republicans have in mind the president's penchant for revising enacted legislation by ad hoc decree, such as last year's decision to delay enforcement of Obamacare's employer mandate until 2015. The mandate requires businesses that employ more than 50 workers to supply them with an authorised health plan. Republicans would like the courts to order the president to enforce the letter of the law. Mr Obama has responded by imploring congressional Republicans to "Stop being mad all the time. Stop, stop, stop just hatin’ all the time." With the mid-term elections only a few months away, one suspects they will decline his advice. It is my understanding that the proposed House lawsuit is of questionable legal merit. The courts generally reject suits brought by individual members of Congress, as the member in question generally has not been personally harmed by the executive action in question, and so lacks legal "standing" to sue. (I'll leave to the legal eagles to determine whether this suit, brought against the president by the House as a body, is somehow different, though I doubt it is.) Moreover, Congress has at its disposal other, more powerful constitutionally specified remedies for unwarranted executive tinkering: lawmakers may pass a new law, withhold the funding necessary for implementation, or impeach the president.

Is the lawsuit then "political theatre", as many contend? Of course it is. To say so is to say next to nothing. Democratic politics is a popularity contest and popularity depends on rousing the sentiments of the people with theatrical gestures. "Stop, stop, stop just hatin' all the time" is itself a delightful, if fecklessly impotent, bit of political theatre. To understand the theatrical logic of the suit, one must understand the logic of the political drama at hand.

Ezra Klein of Vox helps us in this regard by usefully misunderstanding that drama. Mr Klein suggests a certain irony in Mr Boehner suing to force the president "to more quickly implement a part of a law that Boehner does not want implemented at all." He asks, "Does that seem weird to you?" as if it should. Mr Klein goes on to theorise that the surface weirdness of the suit disappears if we understand Mr Boehner's extraordinary legal effort as a cagey strategy to release some of the growing pressure for impeachment within his ranks without risking the potentially disastrous fallout of an unpopular impeachment trial.

It may well be that, but I would insist that there is actually nothing even superficially weird or ironic about pressing Mr Obama to implement the employer mandate according to the text of the Affordable Care Act. One need only remind oneself of the reason Mr Obama delayed enforcing the mandate: damage control. Compliance with the mandate would have caused a lot of pain to a lot of businesses. That pain would have further reduced the popularity of an already unpopular law with an already troubled history of implementation, enabling a great deal of political theatre just before the mid-term elections. Pushing implementation until after this November's elections probably has somewhat improved the Democrats' shaky prospects by containing the theatricality of voter dissatisfaction with Obamacare, and the Republicans are mad about it.

The Affordable Care Act is meant to work by applying pain to those who fail to comply with its mandates. Republicans believed this pain would help them win the senate and repeal Obamacare. They're outraged that Obama should get to delay and thereby possibly avoid altogether the potentially self-negating political consequences of his signature legislation simply by unilaterally amending its timeline to better suit his party's interests. Mr Obama effectively denied the Republicans the political theatre they wanted by refusing to bring the pain he had promised voters. So the Republicans are doing their best to bring the pain to Mr Obama by theatrically accusing him of imperial lawlessness—a move sure to rouse their base—in a way that reminds voters of the pain of Obamacare that will soon descend upon them ... unless the Democrats are chucked out of the Senate.

Mr Boehner's suit may be terrible law, but it's not bad theatre, and it's very possibly smart politics.