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Page Number: 75.0

4 

ARIZONA STATE LEGISLATURE v. ARIZONA 

INDEPENDENT REDISTRICTING COMM’N
 
SCALIA, J., dissenting 

gress  to  challenge  the  Line  Item  Veto  Act,  which  they
claimed  “ ‘unconstitutionally  expand[ed]  the  President’s 
power’ ”  and  “ ‘alter[ed]  the  constitutional  balance  of  pow-
ers  between  the  Legislative  and  Executive  Branches.’ ” 
Id.,  at  816.  In  Massachusetts  v.  Mellon,  262  U. S.  447, 
479–480  (1923),  we  refused  to  allow  a  State  to  pursue  its
claim that a conditional congressional appropriation “con-
stitute[d]  an  effective  means  of  inducing  the  States  to
yield  a  portion  of  their  sovereign  rights.” 
(And  Mellon 
involved a contention that one government infringed upon 
another  government’s  power—far  closer  to  the  traditional
party-versus-party  lawsuit  than  is  an  intragovernmental 
dispute.)  We  put  it  plainly:  “In  the  last  analysis,  the
complaint  of  the  plaintiff  State  is  brought  to  the  naked
contention that Congress has usurped the reserved powers
of  the  several  States,”  id.,  at  483—and  because  the  State 
could not show a discrete harm except the alleged usurpa-
tion of its powers, we refused to allow the State’s appeal. 

The  sole  precedent  the  Court  relies  upon  is  Coleman  v. 
Miller,  307  U. S.  433  (1939).    Coleman  can  be  distin-
guished from the present case as readily as it was distin-
guished  in  Raines.  In  Raines,  the  accurate-in-fact  (but 
inconsequential-in-principle)  distinction  was  that  the 
Senators in Coleman had their votes nullified, whereas the 
Members of Congress claimed that their votes could merely
be  rendered  ineffective  by  a  Presidential  line-item  veto. 
Raines,  supra,  at  823–824.  In  the  present  case  we  could 
make  the  accurate-in-fact  distinction  that  in  Coleman 
individual legislators were found to have standing, whereas
here  it  is  the  governmental  body,  the  Arizona  Legisla- 
ture,  that  seeks  to  bring  suit.  But  the  reality  is  that  the 
supposed holding of Coleman stands out like a sore thumb 
from the rest of our jurisprudence, which denies standing 
for intragovernmental disputes. 

Coleman  was  a  peculiar  case  that  may  well  stand  for 
nothing.  The opinion discussing and finding standing, and