I just returned from a week of sun, fun, and politics with the happy National Review cruisers of the Allure of the Seas. One of the frequent topics of conversation (other than favorite Democrat loser on November 5 or the Republican presidential nominee in 2016) was the White House’s coming order deferring the deportation of illegal immigrants. President Obama is flouting his fundamental duty, set out in Article II of the Constitution, to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The president can only refuse to carry out an Act of Congress if it violates the higher law of the Constitution – which no one seriously claims is at issue with the immigration laws.

NR speakers on the cruise, including me, were at a loss on how to oppose President Obama’s violation of the Constitution. Challenges to the White House’s earlier refusals to enforce Obamacare, immigration, and welfare laws have failed. Talk of impeachment may follow the Framers’ original design, but it is politically impossible and self-destructive.

What about legal options? Conservatives are trapped because they favor a limited scope for judicial review by the federal courts. Under the doctrine of standing, long favored by conservatives, no individual can bring a claim unless they have suffered a discrete “injury in fact” that is traceable to the government’s conduct and can be redressed by the court. President Obama’s refusal to enforce the law affects us all by violating the Constitution, but it is hard to claim that it harms any individual citizen (it only benefits the illegal immigrant).

But an overlooked lawsuit may offer a path forward to a court challenge to Obama’s coming order. On September 16, West Virginia’s attorney general, Patrick Morrisey, sued the president to stop his “administrative fix” to the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare. According to the suit, filed by Elbert Lin (the state solicitor general and a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas), the Department of Health and Human Services illegally foisted its own statutory duty to enforce the ACA’s market requirements on to the states. By passing the buck, the Obama administration wants to commandeer unwilling states, make them politically accountable (in lieu of the HHS) for the change, and create dissonance in federal law on a state-by-state basis. You don’t want federal law to mean one thing in West Virginia and another in Massachusetts. And in the undocumented immigration context, the administration is threatening to simply ignore federal law.

Regardless of how the anti-commandeering claim (as U.S. Supreme Court cases call it) comes out on the merits, West Virginia’s suit highlights the way for a federal court challenge to an Obama immigration order. These administration abuses injure states, which the Supreme Court has said deserve “special solicitude” in these situations. West Virginia has standing because it has been injured: Not only must it spend money and resources to enforce federal law within its borders, it must also bear political accountability brought on by the shift of responsibility from HHS to the state. The harm seems far more imminent and actual than the purported standing recognized by Justice Stevens in Massachusetts v. EPA (2007), where the Court found injury in fact because Massachusetts might lose land to the rising seas brought on by global warming.

States, whether West Virginia on Obamacare, Arizona on immigration or, in a Republican administration, Vermont on environmental policy, should have the minimum right to ask federal courts to compel the president to live up to his constitutional job-description: faithful execution of the laws.