In 2014, Congress sued the executive branch over the president’s refusal to enforce the law. It was kind of a mind bender because the majority in Congress hated the law that wasn’t being enforced — ObamaCare — and had repeatedly tried to kill it entirely.

But there we were: U.S. House of Representatives v. Burwell, in which the Republican-controlled House sued over the failure to implement provisions of President Obama’s signature health insurance law that the same lawmakers who brought the suit said would cripple businesses by requiring large employers to provide insurance for workers.

Another, more obvious, claim from Republicans was that the administration was using a kind of slush fund in the Treasury Department to pay subsidies to insurance companies that hadn’t been included in the original legislation passed by Democrats alone four years earlier.

Obama was keeping his fragile program intact by withholding the sticks and being generous with the carrots. There were all kinds of lawsuits from states and organizations over specific provisions, notably the requirement that policies from religious groups still had to cover birth control and that very pricey employer mandate. But the House lawsuit was more fundamental: Did the president have a kind of “prosecutorial discretion” that went beyond the criminal law? Could the president move money around to pay for his priorities without congressional approval?

That question of prosecutorial discretion was a hot one just then. The day before the lawsuit was filed in November — which was just weeks after Democrats had taken a terrible drubbing in the midterms — Obama had unleashed a raft of executive orders to........

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