Well, duh.
A majority of Americans disapprove of House Republicans' plan to sue President Obama, a new poll shows, illustrating the political risk their election year maneuver carries.
Fifty-four percent disapprove, the CBS News poll shows. Just 37 percent say they approve of the plans.
I realize "duh" is not exactly top-notch punditizing, but I'm really not sure what else to say; polling on the nebulous "lawsuit" notion seems more likely to be a stand-in for generic party approval/disapproval than anything else.
Why? Because even if you're a die-hard Republican the lawsuit itself is incoherent, an apparent effort to strengthen parts of Obamacare Republicans have been railing against for years. The mere premise of a lawsuit against the president sounds silly when you say it, as if the Republican House has thrown up its hands at the thought of doing any actual governance at all and now has been reduced to stunts to prevent anyone else from governing either. And with the talk of supposed Obama "lawlessness,, it's clearly meant as a flimsy stand-in for impeachment, something Republicans hope will sooth the frothy base (since it looks weak, it won't) without making themselves look impeachment-happy to the wider public (but that ship has sailed.)
Like shutting down the government, it's a transparently stupid idea that House Republicans are undertaking only because they are obsessed with their own internal battles to do something more anti-Obama than the next guy. As we've repeatedly seen, the party has given up all pretense of playing to the center, preferring endless base-rattling in an effort to squeeze out the votes they need from their dwindling ranks of increasingly hard-right supporters. But if they lose the lawsuit they get nothing, and if they win the lawsuit they also get nothing; there's no end game here, the stunt of "announcing" the lawsuit was the only plan.