Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/524bv.pdf
Page Number: 81.0

524US1

Unit: $U72

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FEDERAL ELECTION COMM’N v. AKINS

Scalia, J., dissenting

scription of CIA expenditures.
Just as the (more indirect)
harm caused to Mr. Akins by the allegedly unlawful failure
to enforce FECA is precisely the same as the harm caused
to everyone else: unavailability of a description of AIPAC’s
activities.

The Constitution’s line of demarcation between the Execu-
tive power and the judicial power presupposes a common un-
derstanding of the type of interest needed to sustain a “case
or controversy” against the Executive in the courts. A sys-
tem in which the citizenry at large could sue to compel Exec-
utive compliance with the law would be a system in which
the courts, rather than the President, are given the primary
responsibility to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully exe-
cuted,” Art. II, § 3. We do not have such a system because
the common understanding of the interest necessary to sus-
tain suit has included the requirement, afﬁrmed in Richard-
son, that the complained-of injury be particularized and dif-
ferentiated, rather than common to all the electorate. When
the Executive can be directed by the courts, at the instance
of any voter, to remedy a deprivation that affects the entire
electorate in precisely the same way—and particularly when
that deprivation (here, the unavailability of information) is
one inseverable part of a larger enforcement scheme—there
has occurred a shift of political responsibility to a branch
designed not to protect the public at large but to protect
individual rights.
“To permit Congress to convert the un-
differentiated public interest in executive ofﬁcers’ compli-
ance with the law into an ‘individual right’ vindicable in the
courts is to permit Congress to transfer from the President
to the courts the Chief Executive’s most important constitu-
tional duty . . . .” Lujan, supra, at 577.
If today’s decision
is correct, it is within the power of Congress to authorize
any interested person to manage (through the courts) the
Executive’s enforcement of any law that includes a require-
ment for the ﬁling and public availability of a piece of paper.