Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 57

524US1

Unit: $U72

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12

FEDERAL ELECTION COMM’N v. AKINS

Syllabus

(a) Respondents satisfy prudential standing requirements. FECA
speciﬁcally provides that “[a]ny person” who believes FECA has been
violated may ﬁle a complaint with the FEC, § 437g(a)(1), and that “[a]ny
party aggrieved” by an FEC order dismissing such party’s complaint
may seek district court review of the dismissal, § 437g(a)(8)(A). His-
tory associates the word “aggrieved” with a congressional intent to cast
the standing net broadly—beyond the common-law interests and sub-
stantive statutory rights upon which “prudential” standing tradition-
ally rested. E. g., FCC v. Sanders Brothers Radio Station, 309 U. S.
470. Moreover, respondents’ asserted injury—their failure to obtain
relevant information—is injury of a kind that FECA seeks to address.
Pp. 19–20.

(b) Respondents also satisfy constitutional standing requirements.
Their inability to obtain information that, they claim, FECA requires
AIPAC to make public meets the genuine “injury in fact” requirement
that helps assure that the court will adjudicate “[a] concrete, living
contest between adversaries.” Coleman v. Miller, 307 U. S. 433, 460
(Frankfurter, J., dissenting). United States v. Richardson, 418 U. S.
166, distinguished. The fact that the harm at issue is widely shared
does not deprive Congress of constitutional power to authorize its vindi-
cation in the federal courts where the harm is concrete. See Public
Citizen v. Department of Justice, 491 U. S. 440, 449–450. The informa-
tional injury here, directly related to voting, the most basic of political
rights, is sufﬁciently concrete. Respondents have also satisﬁed the re-
maining two constitutional standing requirements: The harm asserted
is “fairly traceable” to the FEC’s decision not to issue its complaint, and
the courts in this case can “redress” that injury. Pp. 20–25.

(c) Finally, FECA explicitly indicates a congressional intent to alter
the traditional view that agency enforcement decisions are not sub-
ject to judicial review. Heckler v. Chaney, 470 U. S. 821, 832, distin-
guished. P. 26.

2. Because of the unusual and complex circumstances in which the
case arises, the second question presented cannot be addressed here,
and the case must be remanded. After the FEC determined that many
persons belonging to AIPAC were not “members” under FEC regula-
tions, the Court of Appeals overturned those regulations in another
case, in part because it thought they deﬁned membership organizations
too narrowly in light of an organization’s First Amendment right to
communicate with its members. The FEC’s new “membership organi-
zation” rules could signiﬁcantly affect the interpretative issue presented
by Question Two. Thus, the FEC should proceed to determine whether
or not AIPAC’s expenditures qualify as “membership communications”
under the new rules, and thereby fall outside the scope of “expendi-