Well into our sixth year with this president, we’re long past the point of having to demonstrate his indifference to the rule of law—the unconstitutional appointments, the Obamacare rewrites, the IRS and VA scandals, the list goes on. In fact, it’s Obama’s indifference simply to doing his job that lately has drawn attention. “The bear is loose”—on the golf course, in the pool hall, dining late with athletes and entertainers. It’s driven House Republicans to talk of impeachment and of a House suit against him for his failure to faithfully execute the laws.

Both would be a mistake, Thomas Sowell tells us this morning, and he’s right. As November’s mid-term elections loom just ahead, either course would shift public attention from Obama to his critics, just as happened when the House impeached President Clinton. Not that there isn’t a case to be made for both impeachment and a suit. But impeachment, at the end of the day, is less a legal than a political matter, as we saw in the Clinton episode. So too is the suit that Speaker Boehner is now considering. Both proposals, therefore, have to be looked at through that lens.

To a good many in the House, however, a suit against the president seems like the lesser but wiser course. And contrary to first impressions, including my own, such a move is not as far-fetched as it might seem. In fact, if one takes the time to wade through the dense testimony that our good friend Elizabeth Price Foley presented to the House Judiciary Committee last February, it soon becomes clear that the standing objection that arises immediately with such a suit could likely be overcome in this case.

But even if a suit could get off the ground, would one be wise? True, unlike with impeachment, where the House is the “grand jury” and the Senate the “court,” in this case it wouldn’t be the other political branch attacking the president. Rather, attention would be directed to the third, non-political branch of government, where the action would be happening, and that would soften the attack to some extent, making it seem less a political than a legal charge. But those are subtleties. In the hands of the media, they’d likely pass over most heads as we move toward November.

And what turns on November? Nothing less than the courts themselves, as Sowell points out. To elaborate just a bit on the point, after November, Obama will have two more years in office. He got off to a slow start exercising the most long-lasting of a president’s powers, the power to nominate judges for lifetime appointments on our federal courts. But he’s catching up. We saw just last month how his two Supreme Court appointments have read the Constitution on some of the most important cases of the Court’s just-concluded term.

Well it’s no different below, especially in the courts of appeal, except that it’s less noticed. We tend to focus on the Supreme Court, which blinds us too often to the fact that the Court decides only 70 or so cases a year while the 13 federal appellate courts terminate some 60,000 cases—and they don’t always follow the guidance of the Supreme Court in doing so. It’s crucial, therefore, given the inclination of this president to see his view of the Constitution reflected in the people he nominates for seats on those courts, to have a Senate over the next two years that will carry out its advice and consent responsibilities more responsibly than has been done under the leadership of Harry Reid. Anything that distracts from that focus should be avoided.