Raines v. Byrd

By a 7-2 majority, the Court ruled that the appellees lacked standing to sue. Chief Justice Rehnquist, who delivered the Court's opinion, noted that Article III, section 2 of the Constitution enumerates the types of "cases and controversies" which federal courts have power to decide. These include disagreements between citizens, a citizen and a state, a state and the federal government, and so on. In order to be judged as "having standing," the appellees would have to show, in the chief justice's words, "a personal injury that is particularized, concrete, and otherwise judicially cognizable." In other words, a person bringing a suit has to point to a specific law that the accused has violated, and to show how that action has affected the plaintiff. The Court had always been strict on issues of judicial standing, the chief justice noted, particularly in instances where the dispute involved two branches of the federal government.

As for the question of legislative standing--that is, the standing of appellees to sue as members of Congress--this was a question on which "This Court has never had occasion to rule . . . " The appellees had tried to cite Powell v. McCormack (1969), which involved the exclusion of Representative Adam Clayton Powell from his congressional seat due to allegations of financial wrongdoing, but the Court found that Powell was no guide. The appellees could not claim, as Powell had, that they had been "singled out for specially unfavorable treatment as opposed to other members of their respective bodies." Rather, they were claiming that the act caused "a type of institutional injury which damages all Members of Congress equally." Furthermore, that injury was really a loss of political power in their offices, as opposed to the loss of something to which they were personally entitled.

Nor did the appellees find much help in Coleman v. Miller (1939), the only case in which the Court had upheld standing for legislators who claimed an institutional injury--i.e., something that affected an entire legislative body. In that instance, a state legislature had been locked in a tie vote on ratification of an amendment to the federal Constitution, and the state's lieutenant governor had broken the tie by casting the deciding vote. The legislators in Coleman had "a plain, direct and adequate interest in maintaining the effectiveness of their votes," whereas the appellees in the present case could not point to a single bill that had been defeated because of the Line Item Veto. They had been given a chance to vote against the act when it was under debate, had done so--and had lost, fair and square. "To uphold standing here would require a drastic extension of Coleman," the chief justice wrote, " . . . for there is a vast difference between the level of vote nullification at issue in Coleman and the abstract dilution of institutional power appellees allege." The legislators in Coleman could point to a specific measure that had failed because of the lieutenant governor's intervention; those in the present case, however, could only make vague references to possible violations of constitutional principle.

Throughout the nation's history, there had been numerous situations in which one member or another of the executive or legislative branches had cause to challenge a measure on the basis of "claimed injury to official authority or power." The Court cited, for instance, the Tenure of Office Act of 1867, The Pocket Veto case of 1929, and the Federal Election Campaign Act struck down in Buckley v. Valeo (1976). Again and again, there had been such instances, in which the parties involved had at least as much standing as those in the present case, but they had not initiated legal action. This was a fortunate thing, because the Constitution provided a limited role for courts, which the framers never intended as arenas in which to decide every possible disagreement.

The proper place to decide the present disagreement, the Court concluded, was where it had begun: in Congress. Whereas the appellees had not been authorized by their respective Houses to take the present legal action--"indeed, both Houses actively oppose their suit"--they did have voting power as members of the legislative branch. As such, they possessed the potential to either repeal the act or at least to exempt bills from its reach (as they could do simply by adding such a proviso in the bill itself, as the Post had observed.) Finally, the Court's ruling did not prevent someone with genuine standing to challenge the act--a statement which paved the way for a later line-item veto challenge.